NO ROADS INTO ROME: RUSSIA’S FAILURE TO ESTABLISH THE OKHRANA IN ITALY, 1900-1914

Walter Keith Gay

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Global Studies.

Chapel Hill 2020

Approved by:

Chad Bryant

Serenella Iovino

Erica Johnson

© 2020 Walter Keith Gay ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ii

ABSTRACT

Walter Keith Gay: No Roads into Rome: Russia’s Failure to Establish the Okhrana in Italy, 1900-1914 (Under the direction of Erica Johnson)

Between 1900 and the commencement of the First World War in 1914, the Russian government under Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) engineered an expansion of its European based espionage agency called the Foreign Agentura. During that period, Italy had become a haven for

Russian extremists and the Italian government challenged Russia for hegemonic influence in the

Balkans. The combination of these issues magnified the threat Italy posed to the success of the foreign policy toward Europe. Strangely, Russia did not open a branch of the Foreign Agentura in the southern Mediterranean state of Italy. While the Okhrana’s spy operations seemed to have flourished in France, Germany, Great Britain, as well as in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman

Empires, it seems to have lacked the required organizational prowess to infiltrate Italy. This thesis seeks to isolate the historical factors that influenced Russia’s failure to open a division of

Foreign Agentura in Italy.

iii To my mother Carol Gay and my future wife Amber Young Thank you for your endless love and support.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Erica Johnson, Chad Bryant, Serenella Iovino, Donald J. Raleigh, Jeff Jones, and Zach Ward

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Introduction and Purpose of Study……………………………………………1

CHAPTER 2: The Okhrana’s Historical Evolution…………………………………………20

CHAPTER 3: Italy as Case Study of the Foreign Agentura on the European Continent…………………………………………………..44

CHAPTER 4: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...80

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………….90

Bibliography: ……………………………………………………………………………....101

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Chapter 1: Introduction and Purpose of Study

Introduction

Between 1900 and the commencement of the First World War in 1914, the Russian government gradually amplified the scope of its counter-revolutionary operations by increasing the numerical size of the empire’s most powerful political police organization called the

Okhrana.1 The agency’s expansion over this timeframe, which was managed by Russia’s

Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD),2 specifically focused on the further development of its international wing known as the Foreign Agentura. The entire project was sanctioned by Tsar

Nicholas II (1894-1917) in response to a worsening anti-tsarist sociopolitical climate across the empire the during final years of the 19th century. More important, the monarch harbored a deep trepidation over the Okhrana’s capability to stymie the Russian émigré intelligentsia’s attempts to orchestrate a coup d’état from continent. Before adding to its existing cohort of agents that were attached to the Foreign Agentura singular outpost in Paris, the MVD clandestinely established new branches of the Okhrana in both Galicia (Poland)3 and Berlin.4 During the same year, a division called the Balkans Agency was installed in Bucharest (Romania).5 Between

1 The term Okhrana or Okhranka was an acronym that was a derivative of Otdeleniye to Okhraneniyu Obshchestvennoy Bezopasnosti I Poryadka which translates to The Department for Protecting Public Security and Order.

2 The acronym MVD comes from Ministers Vnutrennikh Del which is Russian translation for the empire’s “Ministry of Internal Affairs" or "Ministry of the Interior."

3 Lauchlan, Iain. Russian Hide-and-seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906-1914, 94. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002. Lauchlan uses “Galicia” to refer to what would be the Polish state after World War I.

4 Lauchlan, 356

5 ibid, 101

1 1906 and 1909, the Ministry placed secret agents in London, where they worked clandestinely from the office of a ‘cover firm’ called the Russian Imperial Financial Agency.6 In 1911, Russia added another bureau called the Balkans Agency in the Ottoman Empire’s capital of

Constantinople.7

The term “intelligentsia” was a broad classification for Russia’s cultural elite and was comprised of “the educated and enlightened segment of society.”8 Up to the1880s, they challenged the autocratic rule of the Russian monarchy but had been chased into political exile outside of the empire by the Okhrana during the tenure of Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas’ father and predecessor. From these new satellite offices of the Foreign Agentura throughout Europe, undercover agents hunted exiled members of the Russian émigré intelligentsia such as Mikhail

Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Valerie Burtsev and Vladimir Lenin. On the continent, these individuals engaged in fomenting revolutionary extremism abroad. Usually, they attempted to evade arrest by the Okhrana’s legion of covert operatives by hiding among immigrant enclaves of the Russian diaspora in urban centers. Foreign Agentura agents uncovered the plots of their co-conspirators and acolytes by infiltrating revolutionary organizations in order to stop them from smuggling propaganda literature, weapons, and ammunition into the empire. Russia also used the Agentura to spy on government and military officials of the respective countries in which they were placed. The Okhrana’s espionage operations abroad were carried out in order to assuage Russia’s critical geopolitical concerns. Chief among these issues was the security of the

6 ibid, 103

7 ibid, 207

8 Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, D.N. Istoria Russkoi Intelligentsii in Sobranie-Sochinenii, 5. St. Petersburg, 1910.

2 empire’s large expanse of unguarded borderland territory which the Russian empire shared with

Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman state. For this reason, the expansion of the Okhrana was a critical component of Russian foreign policy in the late 19th century as it allowed Russia to closely monitor both its regional and international rivals.

During the early 20th century expansion of Russia’s spy network, Italy had become a haven for members of the Russian émigré intelligentsia such as Valery Burtsev and Maxim

Gorky, who were also fugitives of the Okhrana. At that juncture, the Italian government had an official diplomatic alliance with both Germany and the Austria-Hungarian polity. More significantly, it also challenged Russia for hegemonic influence in the Balkans. From 1900, the nearby region had become an important territory in the scheme of Italy’s imperialist ambitions.

The combination of these issues magnified the threat Italy posed to the success of the geopolitical maneuverings of Nicholas’ government. Strangely, Russia did not open a branch of the Foreign Agentura in the southern Mediterranean state of Italy. While the Okhrana’s spy operations seemed to have flourished in France, Germany, Great Britain, as well as in the

Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, it seems to have lacked the required organizational prowess to infiltrate Italy. Why did Russia fail to open a division of Foreign Agentura in Italy, when it was able to successfully install them in these nearby regions?

(Brief) Historical Background

3 On March 13th 1881, Tsar Alexander II (1855-1881) fell victim to an assassination plot by members of an anarchist 9 sect that called itself “The People’s Will.”10 The shocking murder of the 62-year-old Russian monarch both stunned and caused panic among the Russian ruling elites.11 Collectively, the aristocracy interpreted the Tsar's murder as strong evidence that their privileged position atop Russian society was in jeopardy due to an upsurge of politically- motivated extremist violence. For his successor and second son Alexander III (1881-1894), the protection of the Russian elites was a priority along with the preservation of his rule. These two important objectives were contingent upon his ability to eradicate all forms of anti-government dissent from his empire. Almost immediately after his unexpected ascension to the throne, the new Tsar “became fixated on administrative justice aimed at ridding Russian society of those who represented a threat, no matter how slight or tenuous, to the continued well-being of the governing and ruling elites.”12 Alexander III re-established the state's authoritative dominance over Russian society by engineering a massive overhaul of its internal policing system. The Tsar then used his new police force to eliminate all forms of political dissent in Russia.

Alexander’s transformation of the empire’s police system saw the creation of a new police unit called the Okhrana. This new squadron was made up of a small, elite team of detectives, who were trained to carry out a widespread secret surveillance of Russian society.

9 Thorup, Mikkel. An Intellectual History of Terror. War, Violence and the State, 1st ed., 192. London: Routledge, 2012. Thorup contends that "It was ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarchists’- as well as nihilists, dynamiters, Blanquists, assassins, social revolutionists, fanatics- rather than ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ which were used in most of the nineteenth century to describe what we would today term terrorist acts."

10 The English translation of the sect’s Russian name: Narodnaya Volnya

11 Lauchlan, 12

12 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. “The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917.1st ed.,15. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

4 The Okhrana’s agents were specifically tasked with monitoring members of the Russian intelligentsia. Alexander III blamed the intelligentsia’s radicalization of the country’s peasantry, urban industrial workers, growing educated middle class as well as university students for the exponential increase in political violence in Russia. He also believed that their deliberate agitation of these social classes was designed to incite a revolution and had led directly to his father’s brutal murder. The Okhrana’s incessant intimidation and harassment of the Russian intelligentsia was instrumental in the success of Alexander III’s political repression throughout the empire. In order to escape arrest and incarceration by the Russian police, many of these individuals were forced to flee to Europe.

While living as political exiles, members of the Russian intelligentsia continued their political crusade against the Tsar overseas as they “discovered that relatively greater freedom in the West to engage in anti-regime activities.”13 Some of Europe’s ruling elites became fearful that the influx of revolutionary-minded extremists from Russia had created a climate of anti- establishment sentiment across the continent. Alexander III responded to their concerns by offering the services of the Okhrana to help these European governments deal with Russian radicals who were fomenting revolution in their respective countries. Initially, no European leader openly accepted Russia’s assistance. In 1883, the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) established an international branch of the Okhrana called the Foreign Agentura. This new division was created in order to allow Russia’s secret police to have the ability to search for and capture the members of the émigré intelligentsia who lived abroad. Paris was chosen as the location for the inaugural office of the Agentura. Agents operated clandestinely from the

13 Fisher, Ben B. Okhrana, the Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police,1st ed.,1. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997

5 basement of the Russian embassy located on 79 de Grenelle Street.14 At the time, the French capital had become the hub for Russian revolutionary groups operating in much of Europe.15

Also, the city was “the home to a Russian diaspora community estimated at roughly 5,000 immigrants.”16 Members of Russia’s exiled intelligentsia would often attempt to remain undetected by hiding among the Russophone diaspora in Europe. In 1900, the Russian government expanded espionage operations of the Okhrana by gradually creating new sections in

Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Asia.

Depictions of Foreign Agentura in Russian Historiography

The academic literature on the Foreign Agentura has been limited and has been traditionally devoid of analytical diversity because "professional historians have, for the most part, ignored the subject."17 Many of the historical monographs on the Okhrana were written during the latter half of the 20th century following the opening of the Hoover Institute's Okhrana

Archive to the public during the early 1960s. The scholarly analysis of the Imperial Russian espionage agency has explored the socio-political dynamics which surrounded revolutionary struggle of the Russian intelligentsia against the Okhrana, its pivotal role in counterterrorism activities in pre-World War I industrial Europe, and the imprint on the organizational infrastructure Russia’s post-October Revolution security agencies such as the Cheka, NKVD and

14 Zuckerman, Frederic S. The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad, 1st ed.,43. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

15 Hingley, Ronald. The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial Russian, and Soviet Political Security Operations, 1st ed., 72. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

16 Fisher, Ben B. Okhrana, the Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police,1st ed.,1. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997.

17 Zuckerman, Fredrick S. The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917, 3. Basingstoke: Springer, 1996.

6 the KGB. The lack of analytical diversity in the historiography has influenced a tendency among

Russian scholars to exaggerate the Okhrana’s profound influence on 20th century international espionage, its leadership, the tactical and organizational acumen of its top officers as well as its attempt to save the Romanov dynasty from its eventual demise in 1917.

The historiographical trend among Russian scholars to over accentuate the positive qualities of the Foreign Agentura when evaluating the Okhrana perhaps has been influenced by the analysis of legendary historian Richard Pipes. In his seminal text entitled Russia Under the

Old Regime 1919-1924 (1974), the pioneering (western) historian asserts that the Okhrana’s techniques in police rule, introduced piecemeal by the Russian imperial regime, were perfected by their enemies, the Germans, in the Second World War.18 Perhaps, Pipes’ aggrandizement of the agency’s impact on espionage on the continent is a perspective that was guided by the musings of people such as A.T. Vassilyev. His autobiographical memoir, entitled The Ochrana:

The Russian Secret Police (1930), is filled with hyperbolic recollections of the time he served as the last director of Imperial Russia’s internal police force and controlled the covert police division until the downfall of the Tsarist regime.19 Throughout the text, Vassilyev often highlights the failures of the Tsarist bureaucracy while he reiterates the herculean task of his defunct agency to preserve the Romanov dynasty. The former Okhrana chief believed that to ensure the survival of “Russia’s system of Tsardom, the Okhrana's was indispensable” 20 and his

18 Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime 1919-1924, 1st ed., 317, New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1974.

19 Vassilyev was the last Tsarist Chief of Police before Nicholas II's abdication from the throne on 15 March 1917. This position also placed him in charge of the country's internal Okhrana (The "Fontanka" and the Special Section (Osoby Otdel or OO).

20 Vassilyev, A. T., and René Fülöp-Miller. The Ochrana, the Russian Secret Police., 25. London: Harrap, 1930.

7 only regret was that “the Police did not proceed with such strictness as (it) would have prevented the accursed Revolution (1917).”21

Author Richard Deacon supports Vassilyev's assertions about the brilliance of the

Okhrana. In the opening page of his book, A History of the Russian Secret Service (1972), the

British historian writes that “European governments were in awe of the Foreign Agentura’s prowess as a ruthlessly efficient counter-espionage organization.”22 In his portrayal of the revolutionary conflict between the Okhrana and Russian radical intelligentsia, explorer and writer George Kennan also typify the historiographical tendency. He described the contest between them as “something like a dual between the mightiest power on earth, armed with all the attributes of authority on one side, and an insignificant gang of discharged telegraph operators, half-educated seminaries, high-school boys, and university students, miserable little Jews and loose women on the other.”23 Historian Frederick S. Zuckerman also makes similar proclamations in his exposé on Russian Imperial foreign espionage entitled The Tsarist Secret

Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernizing World (2003). In the text’s Preface, the

English scholar writes that the Foreign Agentura “operated in non-Russian Europe as a critical, indispensable element of the maturing European political police network.”24 Ben B. Fisher is another scholar who exemplifies the tendency among historians to accentuate the brilliance of the Okhrana. In his treatise on the Russian spy agency, entitled The Paris Operations of the

Russian Secret Police (1997), Fisher notes that “Lenin and the Bolsheviks studied the

21 ibid.

22 Deacon, Richard. A History of the Russian Secret Service, 1st ed., 1. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1972.

23 Walsh, WB. Russia and the Soviet Union, 395. University of Michigan Press, 1968.,

24 Zuckerman, xvi

8 Okhrana”25 as well as “the KGB decades later, learned from and improved on the tsarist police's repressive methods.”26

The historiographical trend among Russian scholars to over accentuate the positive qualities of the Foreign Agentura is also conspicuous in their attempt tos highlight the mystique surrounding the agency despite its failure to prevent the collapse of the monarchy. In the tenth chapter of his book, which was dedicated entirely to the Foreign Agentura’s first and longest serving director 27 Paul Rachkovsky, Deacon opines that, over the course of his nearly two decades as the Agentura chief, “no secret service chief of his time was so subtle and used espionage so adroitly to bring about changes in foreign policy.”28 However, in the chapter,

Deacon neglects to mention Rachkovsky’s repeated failures to convince either the British or

Italian governments to cooperate with the Foreign Agentura. Also throughout the rest of the chapter, Deacon also fails to mention that Rachkovsky was an overt anti-Semite , yet he somehow devotes three final pages to his explanation of the historical plausibility that Jack the

Ripper was an Okhrana agent.29 At the end of this analysis, Deacon still manages to offer the unsubstantiated theory that the Okhrana was an “example of the incalculable workings of

Russian agent provocateurs at the end of the (20th) century.”30

25 Fischer, Ben B. Okhrana: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police, 1st ed., 13. Washington, D.C.: ICON Group International, 1997.

26 ibid, 13

27 Rachkovsky was the Chief of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agentura from March 1885 until November 1902.

28 Deacon, 118

29 ibid, 128-131

30 ibid, 131

9 Purpose of Study

The goal of this project is to seek answers to Russia's failure to open a bureau of the

Okhrana in Italy between 1900 and the start of World War I. This essay aims to achieve this objective through its specific investigation into the reasons why the Russian government was unsuccessful in this endeavor, despite the numerous geopolitical conundrums Italy provided, which hindered Russian foreign policy objectives concerning Europe. By answering this research question, I argue that Russia was not immune to experiencing major organizational setbacks that limited the Foreign Agentura’s prowess in achieving its objectives in Europe. I will argue further that there were three important factors which limited the agency’s ability to infiltrate Italy. First,

Italy’s aggressive, anti-Russian foreign policy hindered the Tsarist government’s ability to negotiate a solid inter-governmental cooperation between them. Second, the two country’s acerbic geopolitical rapport severely diminished Russia’s ability to formulate a police alliance that was advantageous to St. Petersburg. Third, Italy’s unique sociopolitical culture stymied the effectiveness of the surveillance, espionage and counter-revolutionary propaganda tactics that the

Okhrana used successfully elsewhere on the continent. Ultimately, I hope that this thesis could help shift the historiographical assessment of the Okhrana’s international wing toward a new trajectory by using my discoveries to counterbalance the propensity of scholars to inaccurately over-embellish the Foreign Agentura's prowess as an espionage agency.

Research Materials

Key Primary Sources

My research for this project was heavily influenced by my analysis of primary source data, which was located at the Central Archive of the Italian State (Archivio Centrale Della

10 Stato), in Rome, between December 15th 2017 and January 8th 2018. These archives hold the documents that all Italian state offices deposited 40 years after the records were created. The records of the offices of the Prime Minister, the ministries, and other central bodies are sent to the Central State Archives in Rome and files originating from regional offices are sent to the appropriate State Archives in each province. On my first visit to the Italian archival headquarters,

I provided details about the historical parameters of my study to the curators. After a short wait, I was permitted to view a collection of files they had deemed pertinent to my research. During each of my six subsequent visits, I was fortunate to access a large collection of primary source documents which contained hundreds of declassified correspondences between various Italian government ministries and the country’s regional police departments. Using these documents,

Italian authorities shared confidential intelligence which detailed observations from the surveillance of the Russian diaspora.

The majority of the archival files I analyzed were sent from the police bureau in Genoa to the Italian Ministry of Internal Security (Ministero dell’Interno). A small subset came from

Mediterranean resort towns along the Italian Riviera such as Port Maurizio, La Spezia and San

Remo. Many of the files contained arrest warrants, minutes from interrogations, physical descriptions of suspects as well as a comprehensive analysis of the suspect’s or group’s daily activities. Prior to the commencement of my archival research, I was guided to these resources by two texts. These were Paola Carucci's Italian Archival Sources: Organization and

Conservation (1983)31 as well as Franca and Armando Petrucci’s Writing Relations: Essays for

American Scholars in Italian archives (2008). Each text provided details of what types of

31 Carucci, Paola. Le Fonti Archivistiche: Ordinamento e Conservazione, 1st ed. Roma: Carocci, 1983.

11 primary sources pertaining to my topic were located among the various collections of Italy’s archival system.

During my access to these primary sources in the Italian archive headquarters, the documents I discovered shed light on critical themes pertaining to my quest to decipher why

Russia did not establish an outpost of the Okhrana in Italy between the turn of the 20th century and 1914. Several weeks later, I began to cross reference the names listed in these documents with the Hoover Institute’s Okhrana Archive database of the Foreign Agentura targets.32 Based on files I investigated, some of the names that were recorded by the Italian police as Russian terrorists in Liguria between 1900 and 1914, were also listed as Okhrana targets. In addition, I also compared these names with those I found on the intercepted letters of Russian revolutionaries, which had been collected by the Okhrana’s ‘Special Section’ in St. Petersburg

(Fifth Department of the Special Section of the Department of Police (secret unit). Between 1883 and 1917, these Russian language letters were organized and filed by date, month and year, per the orders of the Russian empire’s Department of Police of the Imperial Russian Ministry of

Internal Affairs. My investigation of these documents allowed me to compare this information with the secondary sources that discussed aspects of the Okhrana’s international operations.

From that process, I formulated my conclusions on the nature of the relationship between the

Italian police and the Okhrana, their obsession with fugitive Russian extremists and the attitude of the Italian government toward the expatriate Russian community in Liguria between 1900 and

World War I.

Key Secondary Sources

32 "Register of the Okhrana Records." Online Archive of California. Accessed September 7, 2018. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt

12 In writing this thesis, I researched information from several relevant secondary sources to triangulate data I found in the archival reservoir of Central Archive of the Italy in Rome. These texts focus on key social, political and economic influences on the Foreign Agentura’s operations between the start of Alexander III's rule (1881) and the October Revolution (1917). Many of these were monographs on the topic which were written by Western (American/British), Russian and Italian scholars. During my research, these books emerged as crucial points of reference which I used in trying to attain answers to the central question of this project. I studied academic works from authors who discussed both the evolution of the Okhrana, its organizational hierarchy of command, and its role in Russian foreign policy during the respective tenures of

Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas I. My research was aided by a core group of historical monographs on the Imperial Russian espionage agency. The most important secondary sources include Iain Lachlan’s Russian Hide and Seek: The Tsarist Police in St. Petersburg, 1905-1914,

(2002); Frederic S. Zuckerman’s The Tsarist Secret Police and Russian Society, 1880-1917

(1996) and The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad (2003); Richard Deacon’s A History of the Russian

Secret Service (1972); Ronald Hingley’s The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial

Russian, Soviet Political and Security Operations (1971); and Ben Fisher’s Okhrana, the Paris

Operations of the Russian Imperial Police (1997). Each of these works trace the evolution of the

Foreign Agentura from the deliberations about its establishment within the Russian government to the decision by the Bolsheviks to disband the Okhrana. Also, Paul Avrich’s Russian

Anarchists (2015) was another important secondary source I employed in this study. A Princeton

University professor’s text discusses the history of European anti-establishment anarchist movements from its Russian origins in the 19th century, its upsurge in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, and its decline and fall after the Bolshevik Revolution.

13 In addition to those historical monographs, my research led me to seek information on the history of Russia revolutionary activity in Italy, the cultural dynamics of Italy’s Russian émigré community and its impact on Italian society. Luca Einaudi’s Russian Exiles in Italy (Esuli Russi in Italia): 1905-1917 (2002) and The Politics of Immigration in Italy from Unification to Today

(Le Politiche dell’Immigrazione in Italia Dall’Unita ad Oggi) (2007) were two excellent Italian language resources which explain the intersectionality of those three cultural phenomena.

Einaudi’s texts were also useful as secondary source which I employed in my research triangulation technique to verify the validity of the names I discovered on the primary source documents I investigated. In these texts, Einaudi also provides a detailed demographical breakdown of immigration to Italy which includes information on the migration of people from the Russian empire. The data he presents in these two books provides quantitative data which allows for crucially formulating a mental picture of the size of the Russian community during the timeframe in comparison to other immigrant groups who assimilated into the population of Italy at large. Other beneficial Italian language texts include Giovanni Mapelli’s Language, Identity and Immigration (Lingua, Identita and Immigrazione) (2010), Asher Colomgo and Guiseppi

Sciortino’s Immigrants in Italy (Gli Immigranti in Italia) (2004), Paolo Buchignani’s Rebels in

Italy (Ribelli d’Italia) (2017).and Renato Risalti’s Russi in Italia tra Settecento e Novecento

(2010) (Russians in Italy between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Century) helped formulate an understanding of the “push” and “pull” factors which brought Russians (and Russophone migrants) to the Italian peninsula from the late 19th century to the early years of the 29th century.

Some important Russian secondary-source texts that I investigated during my research include Z.

Peregudova’s Okhranka: memoirs of the leaders of a political investigation (2004), Uril

14 Arsenovich’s Public and Political Policies of Russia (1900-1917) and A.T Vassilyev’s The

Ochrana, the Russian Secret Police (1930).

Online Sources

In addition to these primary and secondary sources, the database of russinitalia.com was crucial in finding critical information on the Russian community in Italy between the late 19th century and the commencement of World War I. This website was part of a collaborative effort of the Italian Ministry of Culture Heritage and Activities (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività

Culturali or MiBAC), Ministry of Public Education (Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, or MPI) ,Ministry of University and Scientific Research (Ministero dell'Università e della

Ricerca scientifica), the University of Salerno (Università degli Studi di Salerno, or UNISA) as well as a number of Italian scholars who represent a wide range of disciplines connected with the exploration of Russo-Italian cross-cultural pollination in literature, the arts, science and music. This website’s extensive database contains a category entitled “Russi in Italia:

Dizionario” (Russians in Italy: Dictionary) which alphabetically lists of the names of individuals who emigrated from Imperial Russia as far back as the First Crimean War (1853-1856) through till the end of the Russia’s Soviet era.33 In the majority of the cases, each listing also includes a chronological profile which includes an individual’s place of birth, death, occupation, marriage status and their contribution to Italian society during their time in Italy. The sub-sections entitled called “Luoghi Russi in Italia” (Russian places in Italy) 34and “Instituzioni Politiche and

33 "Russi in Italia." Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca scientifica (d'Italia). Last modified April 1, 2020. https://www.russinitalia.it/archiviodettaglio.php?id=70.

34 "Luoghi russi in Italia." Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca scientifica. Last modified April 1, 2020. https://www.russinitalia.it/luoghi.php.

15 Culturali” (Political and Cultural Institutions)35 helped me to map the distribution of Russian communities throughout Italy as well as to gain insight into the importance of Liguria, the Italian

Riviera, Genoa and Nervi to the Russian/Russophone diasporas cultural practices in Italy.

Source Limitations

Unfortunately, while I conducted my research for this project, I was unable to travel to

Russia in order to gain access to archival documents pertaining to the Okhrana in the State

Archive of the Russian Federation. As a result, I could not potentially access any of their collections of primary source data which contain information on topics such as Russian foreign policy mandates toward Italian statesmanship in the early 20th century as well as Imperial

Russian government intelligence on Russian revolutionaries who resided in Italy. More importantly, because I was unable to travel to Russia, I could not find Russian primary source documents which could potentially prove the existence of a branch of the Okhrana in Italy or plans to create one in there during the expansion of the Foreign Agentura between 1900 and the start of the First World War. In order to offset my inability to access information from the

Russian archives, I was able to investigate invaluable primary source data on the Imperial

Russian spy agency from the digitized version of approximately 509 microfilm reels of Stanford

University's Okhrana archive (Hoover Institute for the Study of War and Peace).36 I specifically focused on the digital collection of profiles and photographs that were taken of Russian

35 "Instituzioni politiche e culturali." Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca scientifica. Last modified April 1, 2020. https://www.russinitalia.it/istituzioni.php.

36 "Okhrana Records – Works – Digital Collections." Digital Collections Home – Digital Collections. Accessed November 11, 2018. https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/54048/okhrana- %20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20records?ctx=6a3c3b50-8d16-4f10-a653- ec7993313f9d&idx=1.

16 revolutionaries in Europe by agents of the Foreign Agentura's Paris Office between 1890 and

1910.37 I leaned on the secondary source materials from scholars such as Frederic S. Zuckerman, whose research explicitly involved the use of archival resources from Russia.

Conclusion

The preceding segments of this introductory chapter have been dedicated to unveiling the main purpose of this project, isolating the specific timeframe of its historical focus as well as highlighting both the archival and scholarly sources that were analyzed in the researching of this topic. The primary goal of this essay is to seek answers as to why the Russian government did not establish an outpost of the Okhrana in Italy during the expansion of its intelligence network across Europe between 1900 and the commencement of World War I. There are two main reasons why the absence of a bureau of the Russian espionage agency on Italian soil during this timeframe is a conspicuous historical oddity. First, Russian revolutionary extremists, many of whom were fugitives of the Foreign Agentura, hid among the Russian-speaking expatriate community that resided throughout the southern Mediterranean country. Second, as a result of

Italy’s geopolitical interests in the Balkans as well as its close diplomatic ties with Germany, the

Austro-Hungarian empire and Britain, the surveillance of the Italian government using Russian spies should have been a priority of the Tsarist government in the context of Russian foreign policy during that period. For these important reasons, it is quite puzzling that the Imperial

Russian government did not attempt to open a branch of the Okhrana in Italy during the Foreign

37 "Operational Techniques: Albums of Photographs for Office and Agent Use – Works – Digital Collections." Digital Collections Home – Digital Collections. Accessed November 3, 2018. https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/58985/operational-techniques---albums-of-photographs-for- office-a?ctx=cd538615-9ab4-42ed-b8d9-ced7b15cabfd.

17 Agentura’s roughly three-decade existence. In order to successfully answer this question of why, information pertaining to the topic was gleaned from the analysis of a combination of primary and secondary source materials that were written in English, Italian and Russian.

The second chapter of this essay is devoted to providing historical background information pertaining to the Okhrana’s evolution as Imperial Russia’s international policing apparatus from its inception in 1883 through the start of the Second World War. There are two reasons why tracing the development of the Foreign Agentura is a critical component to the overall didactic framework of this project. First, this exercise provides an important historical foundation for informing the potential reader about the key social as well as international geopolitical factors which influenced the spy agency’s integral role in the Russian government’s late 19th and early 20th century counterterrorism initiatives. Second, it also provides invaluable insight into the rationale behind its decisions about employing the resources of the Okhrana. The second factor is especially crucial to solving the reason why an outpost of the Okhrana was never officially established in Italy after 1900 as they were in Germany, Britain, the Austro-Hungarian

Empire and the Ottoman Empires respectively.

In this essay’s third chapter, my intentions are to employ Italy as a historical case study to support my argument that Russia was not immune to experiencing major organizational setbacks that limited the Foreign Agentura’s ability to fulfill its foreign-policy objectives in Europe. My hypothesis contradicts the general depictions of the Okhrana made by the limited number of

Russian scholars who have produced academic literature on the Okhrana. Among this group includes several influential Western social scientists such as historian Richard Pipes, Richard

Deacon, Fredrick Zuckerman, Ben Fisher, Barbara Jelavich, Dominic Lieven and Gregory

Hingley. I argue that the lack of analytical diversity in the historiography has strongly influenced

18 a tendency among these academics to over-exaggerate the Okhrana's effect on 20th-century international espionage, the cleverness of its agents, the ingenuity of the tactical counter- revolutionary acumen of its directors and its pivotal role in the prevention of the Romanov dynasty’s demise until 1917.

In the third chapter, based on conclusions of my in-depth research, I identify three factors that potentially influenced Russia’s inability to establish an Okhrana presence in Italy. First,

Italy’s anti-Russian foreign policy fueled Russia’s bad diplomatic relations with Italy from the early 1880s to World War I. Second, this poor geopolitical relationship hindered Russia’s inability to formulate a police alliance with Italy that was advantageous to St. Petersburg. Third, the evolution Italy’s unique sociopolitical culture, especially under Italian Prime Minister

Giovanni Giolitti’s five terms in office (1892-1914/1921), stymied the effectiveness of the

Okhrana’s usual tactics of surveillance, espionage and counter-revolutionary propaganda.

19

Chapter 2: The Okhrana’s Historical Evolution

Introduction

The goal of this essay is to identify the reasons why Russia did not open a division of the

Foreign Agentura in Italy during its expansion of the Okhrana across Europe from 1900 to the commencement of the First World War. This enlargement of the espionage agency reflected Tsar

Nicholas II’s fears over the émigré Russian intelligentsia’s ability to instigate a coup d’état from overseas. In addition, the Russia’s Ministry of the Interior (MVD) used Agentura agents to closely monitor the government and military officials of its geopolitical rivals in Europe.

Russia’s failure to open an Okhrana outpost in Italy is strange because of its successful installation of the Foreign Agentura in nearby France, Germany, the Austria-Hungarian empire and Ottoman polity as well as Italy’s challenge for hegemonic influence in the Balkans. This chapter is devoted to providing the background historical information that will be used in the

Chapter 3’s case study analysis and is divided into four segments. The first section traces the evolution of the tsarist tradition of creating secret police organizations. The second section discusses the origins of the Russian intelligentsia and its impact on political repression in

Imperial Russia. The third segment discusses the creation of the Okhrana. The fourth section explains the social and political factors that led to the establishment of its Foreign Agentura division.

Tsarist Tradition of using Secret Agent Organizations

20 The Okhrana was a late 19th century evolutionary step of a behavioral tradition among

Russian monarchs to instinctively create autonomous organizations of secret agents which they personally directed to identify and eliminate political threats to their autocratic rule. This trend originated in 1565 with Ivan the Terrible’s (1547-1575) establishment of the Oprichnina, which he used to nullify the aristocratic boyars' resistance to his rule in order to strengthen his position as the absolute ruler of Russia. The Oprichniks, or 'Oprichniki,' formed a personal cult who always wore black attire and purposefully rode black horses. They were handpicked by the Tsar to instill fear among his enemies and murdered anyone he disliked. Peter the Great (1682-1725) created the Preobrazhenskii Prikaz in order to monitor the Russian empire’s military regiments during his political struggle against his sister, Sofia. Catherine the Great (1762-1796) relied on a security organization called the Secret Expedition, which she used to constantly monitor her

Imperial court for any signs of treasonous political malfeasance. Fearful of the negative influence of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military success, Alexander I (1801-1825) designed his own version called the Secret Service in 1805 to conduct the surveillance of the Imperial Army’s top military officials.

The Third Section was another incarnation of these Tsarist secret agent organizations.

Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) formed the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own

Chancellery (historically abbreviated as the Third Section) as a secret police agency because he also intensely mistrusted the Russian upper class due to its participation in the Decembrist revolt

(December 1st, 1825).38 Following the death of his brother Alexander I, Nicholas’ transition to the throne was interrupted by an unsuccessful coup against the monarchy that was orchestrated by a renegade faction of high-ranking officers within the Russian army. These military leaders

38 Pipes, 185

21 wished to create a constitutional monarchy with a parliament in the mold of France’s post- revolutionary political system (the First French Republic 1792-1804). Luckily, their lack of support from the majority of their subordinates allowed the new Tsar to quickly suppress the insurrection. On July 3rd 1826, Nicholas created the Third Section to spy on members of Russian aristocracy he did not trust. For the majority of his reign, the agency grew from sixteen persons in 1826 to more than forty within twenty years.39 The Third Section had no official office before

1831 and operated all over the Russian empire with seemingly unlimited powers.40 On April 27th

1827, the organization was given an auxiliary military branch called the Separate Corps of the

Gendarmes that was several thousand men strong.41 These two agencies formed the Tsar’s political police force 42 during his thirty year reign.

With the creation of the Third Section, the tsarist political system evolved quickly under

Nicholas I and built the foundations of the modern espionage and counter-espionage in Russia.43

The agency was administratively independent from the supervision of other government agencies with whom it shared intelligence such as the Ministry of Police, the Ministry of Justice, the

Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Chief of the Third Section was subordinate only to the Tsar himself which simultaneously made that individual the most powerful employee of the state as well as the most despised among anti-Romanov Russian revolutionaries. Agents were mandated to conduct surveillance of foreigners and religious

39 Deacon, 57

40 Deacon, 55

41 Pipes, 291

42 Orzhekhovskii, I. V. "Otkrytoe pis'mo P.A. Stolypinu, russkomu premier ministru. Paris: 1911." In Samodrzhavie protiv revoluolitsionni Rossii, 40, 45-46. Moscow, 1982

43 Deacon, 54

22 dissenters, the uncovering and forestalling of subversive actions and were allowed to exercise a certain level of censorship through approving publications prior to their distribution.44 By the end of Tsar Nicholas I’s repressive rule, the Third Section had tentacles spread through all layers of society and the organization had acquired an evil reputation, as a result of its intrusive, brutal and corrupt conduct.45 The agency was dissolved by his successor Alexander II in 1880. Further details about the dissolution of the agency will be part of the information presented in the following sections on the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia and the Okhrana.

The Emergence of the Russian Émigré ‘Intelligentsia’ under Nicholas I

The origins of the Russian émigré Intelligentsia and its historical role in fomenting political violence in Russia stemmed from the social and political repression of the elites under

Nicholas I. The Tsar’s desire to protect the empire from the “ills of foreign influences,” 46 fueled his intense fear of the Russian aristocratic classes. Nicholas appointed Sergei Uvarov as the

Minister of Public Enlightenment in 1833. Uvarov implemented a curriculum that was designed to purposefully prevent the exposure of Russian youth to the ‘harmful’ and ‘idle’ ideas47 from the West. Uvarov believed that “it was necessary to find the principles which formed the distinctive character of Russia, and which belong only to Russia.”48 As a result, he ensured that

44 ibid, 54

45 Zuckerman, 20

46 Deacon, 53

47 Pipes, 292

48 Vernadsky, George, and Fisher, Ralph T, ed. in “S.S Uvarov’s Pronouncements,” in A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, Volume 2: Peter the Great to Nicholas I,

23 the belles-lettres of exalted Western thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Joseph-Pierre

Proudhon, Voltaire, Emmanuel Kant and Wolfgang von Goethe were strictly prohibited.

Tsar Nicholas I used the Third Section specifically to target members of the aristocracy who were educated in Europe. He believed that they were the most likely to be influenced by

Western thinking. As a result, instead of following the traditional custom of closely monitoring the influential members of the Tsar’s court, Nicholas I used the Third Section to closely watch

Russia’s educated classes such as bureaucrats, officers, gentry, courtiers and its intellectual class.

The latter received the most intense scrutiny from the Third Section. This group, who became famously labelled as the Russian intelligentsia, were Western educated members of the nobility who saw themselves as enlightened and “progressive”49 minds. During Nicholas’ reign, the intelligentsia emerged as a sort of “interest group” with “abstract ideals.” 50 Among the most prominent members of this group were Mikhail Petrashevtsy, Alexander Herzen, Fyodor

Dostoevsky, and Nicholay Ogarev as well as anarchist thinkers such as Mikhail Bakunin.

Initially, the Tsar Nicholas’ harassment of the Russian intellectual class inspired the formation of non-violent, underground anti-tsarist revolutionary movements in the empire.

Although his rule was not characterized by widespread dissent,51 Nicholas used the Third Section to arrest, imprison and exile anyone who participated in these secret organizations. These activities were ramped up in the aftermath of the Spring of Nations 52 in 1848 (also historically known as The Revolutions of 1848), as Nicholas became fearful that they would be the conduit

49 Pipes, 251

50 Pipes, 251

51 Zuckerman, 20

52 Merriman, John M. "The Revolutions of 1848: The Legacy of 1848." In A History of Modern Europe: From the Renaissance to the Present, 3rd ed., 719. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

24 through which the social upheaval and ideas of political liberalism would enter his empire. One prominent example of these consortiums was a St. Petersburg-based secret society called the

“Petrashevtsy Circle,” which was created by a Russian aristocrat is Mikhail Petrashevtsy. The group was exposed by the Third Section which led to his arrest in 1849 and subsequent sentencing to death. However, as a result of the influence of his aristocratic family, Petrashevtsy was sent into exile into Eastern Siberia. Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of Russia’s most celebrated novelists, was also arrested in 1849 for publicly reciting a censored letter which advocated for the abolishment of serfdom. For those alleged crimes, he was also given the death penalty but fortunately received a reduced sentence of four years of hard labor in the empire’s Siberian prison camps.

The origins of the Russian émigré intelligentsia and its anti-tsarist activism in Europe can be traced to Alexander Herzen, who was considered one of the pioneer theologians of Russian socialism. In 1835, Herzen was arrested by the Third Section for allegedly participating in a gathering of students who sang songs that were disparaging of Tsar Nicholas’ character. Despite the secret police’s knowledge of Herzen’s active role in underground revolutionary movements, his family’s wealth and social connections allowed him to only be sentenced to banishment in

Siberia until 1840. Seven years later (1847), he left Russia to escape the harsh censorship laws under Nicholas’ government and the constant harassment he received from the Third Section.

Herzen settled briefly in France and Italy, before taking up permanent residence in London.

Herzen would create the Free Russia Press in 1853, while he lived in exile in the British empire’s capital city. In this publication, which he self-titled “the first independent Russian newspaper,’53 Herzen published editorials which castigated the repressive governance of

53 Deacon, 65

25 Nicholas I. In a column aimed at the intelligentsia, he called Nicholas “a cold and merciless being who despised the intellectuals among Russia’s elite.”54

The Russian Intelligentsia and Political Violence under Alexander II

The growth and radicalization of the Russian intelligentsia against the Tsarist government began under the rule of Nicholas I’s successor and son, Alexander II (1855-1881). Alexander II also feared the influence of social and political changes in Europe on the Western educated members of the Russian aristocracy. As a result, Alexander continued his father’s practice of strict censorship. However, in the early years of his rule, young men and women developed an insatiable appetite for forbidden literature and began to create underground literary groups to read these texts clandestinely. In response, the Tsar deployed the Third Section to monitor universities and its incognito agents began to arrest students who were caught with censored literature. The spy agency’s actions sparked riots against the state’s educational practices on university campuses in St. Petersburg between 1861 and 1862. In reaction, the Ministry of

Education closed universities until August of 1863.

During the 1860s, the cohort of Russian émigré intelligentsia grew in size and became more boisterous in their opposition to the Tsar Alexander II. At this historical juncture, Sergei

Nechaev and Nicholas Ogarev were two of the most prominent members of this group who lived in exile on the European continent in order to escape arrest by the Third Section. These two intellectuals collaborated to publish a weekly newspaper entitled “Kolokol” (English translation

“The Bell”) from Geneva, Switzerland. Nechaev wrote the supplement which lambasted the Tsar for the cruelty of his political police as well as his conservative, anti-liberal and anti- revolutionary policies. These broadsides against Alexander II’s despotic rule were primarily

54 ibid

26 aimed at both a European intellectual as well as a Russian expatriate audience. These compositions were disseminated in the form short pamphlets that were written in Russian,

French, English and Italian. More significantly, some of their anti-tsarist literature would be smuggled back into Russia by persons such as students who studied abroad and were often read secretly by underground societies within the empire.

During the late 1860s, the Tsarist government worked diligently to curtail the societal impact of this type of anti-establishment literature on peasants, urban industrial workers, and students through a constant regimen of censorship and imprisonments. Under this volatile social climate, Alexander II’s Third Section created a false sense of security for the realm as it persecuted innocent writers who posed no real threat to anyone.55 At the same time, the agency was too small to cope with the increased proliferation of propaganda which was made possible by advancements in printing technology. Alarmingly, during the final years of Tsar Alexander

II’s reign, the Russian secret service censors only stopped 9,386 of the 93,565,260 copies of literature sent from abroad.56 The Third Section’s failure to prevent anti-tsarist propaganda literature from radicalizing Russia’s youth led to the emergence of anarchist violence against state officials.

By the late 1870s, the Third Section, whose agents had been trained to primarily function as government censors, were not tactically prepared for the upsurge in anarchist violence throughout the empire. As a result, the Third Section failed to discover several assassination plots against Alexander II during the final years of his rule. In November 1878, a secret

55 Deacon, 63

56 Zaionchkovski, S. Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stolettia (politiccheskaia reaksiia (80-X-nachala 90- x), 299-301. Moscow, 1970. These numbers actually represent the Russian secret service’s failures from 1867-1894.

27 organization called The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) made three attempts to blow up

Alexander’s train during his return journey from a holiday in the Crimea.57 On April 20th, 1879, the Tsar miraculously escaped unharmed despite being shot at five times by Alexander Soloviev as he took a short morning stroll on the grounds of the Winter Palace. Soloviev was a peasant born, university educated member of the revolutionary group Land and Liberty (Zemlya I volya).

During February 1880, the Winter Palace was dramatically dynamited, but the emperor again escaped unharmed.58 The perpetrator Stephan Khalturin, who was also a member of the

Narodnaya Volya, had managed to set a timebomb in the dining room of the Tsar’s residence.

The explosion killed eleven imperial guards and wounded thirty others. Alexander and his family were set to have dinner with his nephew Alexander Joseph.59

As a result of the Third Section ineptitude, Alexander II decided to dissolve it on 6th

August 1880, eight months prior to his eventual murder. Before his assassination, the Tsar was convinced by his advisors that he needed to revamp the blueprint of Russia’s entire internal policing system in order to stymie the increasing prevalence of political violence and revolutionary fervor within the empire. Chief among these consultants was Count Mikhail Loris-

Melikov, a retired General of the Russian Army who had commanded forces in the country’s victorious Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878). Following the conflict, Melikov, a member of a wealthy Russian-Armenian noble family, was sent to Kharkov,60 where he was tasked with combatting nihilists and anarchist groups who had succeeded in killing the region’s governor,

57 Avrich and Avrich, 9

58 ibid, 9

59 Alexander Joseph or Alexander of Battenberg was officially titled as the Prince of Bulgaria. He ruled the district from 1879 until 1886.

60 Today Kharkov or Kharkiv is located in contemporary war-torn eastern Ukraine.

28 Prince Dmitri Kropotkin in 1878.61 While serving as an Imperial government bureaucrat in the city, Melikov developed a number of novel theories on how the Russian state could solve its problem of rising political violence within the empire. Through his family’s influence, he was able to gain the trust of the Tsar and enter his tiny circle of trusted aristocrats. After convincing

Alexander of the viability of his plans, Melikov was subsequently allowed to orchestrate the metamorphosis of the country’s police system. Sadly, his transformation of Russia’s internal security apparatus could not prevent the murder of Alexander II, which had been orchestrated by members of an anarchist sect called the Narodnaya Volia (The People’s Will) on March 13,

1881.

The Creation of the Okhrana

The formation of the Okhrana began when the Third Section was annulled by Alexander

II on August 6, 1880. In place of the defunct espionage agency, Count Loris-Melikov created a new secret police division called the Security Section (or OO)62 within the Fontanka police force.63 These OOs would be comprised of a small, elite unit of detectives (filery) and undercover agents (sekretnye sotrudniki), who were trained to specifically perform counter- terrorist surveillance. In addition to St. Petersburg, the inaugural divisions of these Security

Sections were also put in Moscow and Warsaw, which were also urban hubs for anarchist groups at the start of Alexander III’s rule. On December 3, 1882, an imperial ordinance from the

61 Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881, 2nd ed.,480. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

62 The English term Security Sections is derived from Russian Okhrannaye Otdelenia, which was the etymological source for the Okhrana.

63 The Fontanka became the colloquial nickname that Russian people used for the empire’s local patrolmen because the Imperial Police headquarters was located on 16 Fontanka Quai on the banks of the Fontanka River in St. Petersburg.

29 Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), raised the status of the OOs to full-fledged political police bureaus.64 As part of his bureaucratic reorganization of Russia’s police system, Melikov placed the control of Department of Police as well as the OOs under the administrative control of the

MVD. In 1887, the MVD created the Special Section (Osobyi Otdel), a new bureau designed to oversee political police affairs throughout Russia and abroad.65 The Special Section and its subordinates became known the under the popular and infamous misnomer as the ‘Okhrana’.66

By 1883, Alexander III’s assault on radical extremist organizations was spearheaded by the Okhrana, which functioned at the apex of the Fontanka’s political intelligence gathering pyramid,67 and was devoted strictly to the prevention of political crime. The Okhrana gathered most of its intelligence through its ‘external agency’ and ‘internal agency. Secret police staff who were assigned to the ‘external agency’ closely monitored revolutionary targets who had been chosen by OOs “chinovniki.” This title was given to a senior police official within the upper management of the MVD. The OOs ‘external agents’ were usually trained to remain undetected while camouflaged as street vendors, bellhops, chauffeurs, sanitation workers and even beggars. ‘External agents’ were also required to document all of their respective targets’ daily interactions as well as to clandestinely interview their neighbors and acquaintances. The

Okhrana’s ‘internal agency’ was comprised entirely of a cohort of undercover spies who operated as agent provocateurs. They were sent to infiltrate revolutionary organizations and develop close friendships with the members with whom they fomented illegal activity. Then,

64 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. “The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917, 25. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

65 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. “The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917. 1st ed., 25. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

66 Deacon, 25

67 ibid, 26

30 ‘internal agency’ spies would notify their superiors of planned illegal activity and the superiors would prevent the orchestration of a plan at the last moment by the police force.

The legal foundation for the Okhrana’s counter-revolutionary activities were based on two laws Alexander III had decreed a few months after his father’s murder. On August 14th

1881, he introduced the Reinforced Safeguard (Usilennnaia Okhrana) and the Extraordinary

Safeguard (Chrezvychainaia Okhrana) laws (ukase).68 The Reinforced Safeguard statute gave the power to regional governors to imprison any resident for up to three months, forbid all social public gatherings, hand over “troublemakers” to military justice, and deny individual rights to reside in their area.69 The Extraordinary Safeguard law allowed the Tsar to have the power to conduct the dismissal of “untrustworthy” civil servants who worked within government institutions at any moment, close institutions of higher learning for up to a month, suspend periodicals without warning, and jail persons who were guilty of inspiring substantial suspicion from the point of view of state security for up to three months.70 These edicts reflected how deeply Russia’s ruling and governing elites suspected everyone beyond the pale of their own institutions as a potential enemy.71

In the immediate aftermath of his father’s assassination, Tsar Alexander III became fixated on “administrative justice aimed at ridding Russian society of those who represented a threat, no matter how slight or tenuous, to the continued well-being of the governing and ruling

68 Pipes, 306 and Zuckerman, 46. These edicts were also called the “Exceptional Measures Statute” and the “Statutes on Measures for the Protection of State Order and Public Tranquility”.

69 Pipes, 306

70 Ibid

71 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. “The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917. 1st ed.,8. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

31 elites.”72 The introduction of these new draconian legal statutes amplified the powers of the

Russian police to an unprecedented level which caused the fate of the entire population of Russia to become dependent on the personal opinions of functionaries of the political police.73 At the same time, both statutes also allowed for Russia’s deeply embedded cultural disposition toward overt xenophobia during political crises to severely jaundice the empire’s police practices.

Okhrana activities often targeted Russia’s Polish, Ukrainian, Transcaucasia as well as Jewish minorities. Alexander III sanctioned by royal decree the infamous “May Laws” in 1882. These anti-Semitic laws, which were devised by his new Director of the MVD Dmitri Tolstoi (who served as Russia’s Minister of Education under his father), were specifically designed to restrict the ability of Jews to rent, purchase or lease properties in towns and cities outside of the Pale of

Jewish Settlement.74

In addition to hardcore anarchists and other anti-tsarist revolutionaries, students, merchants, doctors, lawyers, artist, singers, musicians, thespians, and even housewives comprised the approximately 4940 people who were convicted and imprisoned under these two statutes (the Extraordinary Safeguard and the Reinforced Safeguard )between 1881 and 1883.75

Between 1881 and 1887, the ‘external agency’ of the Okhrana’s intelligence apparatus had helped to tabulate an alphabetically ordered list which contained the biographical data of 129,790

72 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. "The Development of Modern Policing Institutions in Russia, 1800-1902." in The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917, 15. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

73 Pipes, 307

74 Rosenthal, Herman. "MAY LAWS." JewishEncyclopedia.com. Last modified January 1, 2011. http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10508-may-laws.

75 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. “The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917. 17. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

32 politically “unreliable” persons.76 Individuals on that list were often taken into custody by the

Imperial Russian Department of Police and put on trial for either their past, present or possible future transgressions of political anarchism or anti-government activity. During the Tsar’

Alexander III’s thirteen-year rule of the Russian empire (1881-1894), 5,397 people were arrested and subsequently sent into exile from 4,295 cases, 77 which were created from information documented by agents of the Okhrana sequestered during secret surveillance operations throughout the country. Russia’s ethnic minorities were a conspicuous subset of the individuals who were both targeted and persecuted by the during Alexander III’s repression of Russian society.

In the first two years of Alexander III political repression, Russian revolutionaries fled to

Europe in greater numbers than in the previous decades. Surprisingly, on the continent, some discovered relatively greater freedom in the West to engage in anti-regime activities.78 Russian revolutionaries, who were fortunate to flee into exile on their own volition, often assimilated among Russophone immigrant communities in Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany, France and

Italy. In these countries, as Alexander Herzen did from London in the 1850s, they criticized the severe nature of tsarist political repression. The anti-Tsarist opinions of these Russian émigré intelligentsia were usually fused with their respective anti-establishment viewpoints and were circulated in the form pamphlets. Initially, they were often distributed clandestinely among the

Russian speaking enclaves throughout (western and central) Europe. Soon after their release on the continent, anti-Romanov propaganda would be read by groups of anarchists, student

76 ibid, 23

77 ibid, 24

78 Fisher, 2

33 organizations, Marxists, and other social revolutionary groups (SRs) both in Europe and within the Russian empire’s borders. Much to the chagrin of the respective governments of the

European polities in which exiled Russian-speaking emigres resettled, the multi-lingual members of Russian intelligentsia often engaged in fomenting revolutionary extremism among the disenfranchised segments of the non-Russophone indigenous population.

During the final decade of the reign Alexander III father (Alexander II), the repeated failures of the Third Section to prevent anarchist attacks which were perpetrated by the Tsar as well as other high-ranking state officials were also exacerbated by imperial police’s inability to clandestinely capture prominent revolutionary-minded Russian exiles on the continent. Over this timeframe, the tsarist bureaucracy of Alexander II was also unable convince to the British,

German, Austro-Hungarian, Swiss, and French governmental authorities to extradite fugitive

Russian terrorists who lived within their respective jurisdictions. During Alexander II’s rule

(1855-1881), there were two sociopolitical impediments to Russia’s success in negotiations between its tsarist officials and those of these European countries over this issue. First, throughout this time period, states such as Great Britain, Germany and France had adversarial geopolitical relationships (of varying degrees of severity) with the Imperial Russian empire.

Second, in the absence of inter-state enmity with Russia, the judicial legislature within some foreign states often prevented their extradition Russian revolutionary trouble-makers living with their borders. During Alexander II’s tenure, Switzerland was one pertinent example of this dynamic. By late 1870s, Geneva had become the base for anarchist groups such as The People’s

Will (Narodnaya Volya). However, because of a strict adherence to its own laws, Swiss

34 authorities resisted extraditing anyone charged with the commission of a political crime and its dilatory behavior discomforted the tsarist regime to no end.79

The imperial bureaucracy’s failure to arrest wanted members of the Russian émigré intelligentsia either through international diplomatic negotiations or the Third Section’s covert operations on the continent, led directly to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result, the during the first two years of Alexander III’s reign the high-ranking bureaucrats with the MVD convinced the new Tsar that he should sanction the creation of a new secret service agency which would operate exclusively abroad. In 1883, the Ministry of the Interior established the Okhrana’s international wing which was specifically tasked with the apprehension of exiled

Russian revolutionaries who jeopardized the existence of the Russian state with their anti-tsarist activities from abroad.

The Creation of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agentura

In 1883, the Imperial Russian consulate in Paris was designated as the first headquarters for the Okhrana’s new international wing called Foreign Agentura. This western European location was chosen by the top brass of the MVD for three main reasons. First, by the 1880s, the

French capital had become the home of an émigré community of approximately five-thousand

Russians,80 and the hub for Russian revolutionary groups operating in much of Europe.81 During early stages of Tsar Alexander III’s ferocious suppression of all forms of anti-tsarist political opposition within Russian society, the Okhrana’s incessant persecution of the empire’s

79 Zuckerman, 59

80 Fisher, 2

81 Hingley, Ronald. The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial Russian, and Soviet Political Security Operations, 1st ed., 72. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

35 intelligentsia quickly forced its more militant dissidents into the urban centers of western Europe.

Some of the most influential members of Russia’s exiled extremists resided either temporarily or permanently in the French capital, where they had a prominent role in fomenting revolutionary fervor that caused an exponential increase in anti-establishment activity in France during the early 1880s.

In the early stages of Tsar Alexander III’s tenure as the Imperial Russian monarch, Peter

Kropotkin was arguably the most prominent representative of exiled Russian radicals on the continent. The infamous anarchist drew support for his notorious crusade against the European ruling elite from among Paris’ Russophone immigrant as well as native French working-class communities. Second, acolytes of zealots such as Kropotkin, who were swayed toward committing acts of political violence against either the French or Russian state, often hid among the Russian speaking immigrant enclave within France’s largest city. As a result, unlike in the decades prior to Alexander III’s rule, there was now mutual interest for an inter-agency collaboration between the MVD controlled Russian Department of Police and the French Surete

Générale (French Internal Security Division) in order to share intelligence regarding Russian nihilist activity in France. Third, despite the adversarial geopolitical rapport between France and

Russia since the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the two governments gradually grew friendlier in the aftermath of France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870-

May 1871). In the decade after the conflict, French elites believed that the only way they could dissuade any future military aggression from Germany was through an alliance with a military power like Russia. Collectively, each of these three factors made Paris the ideal choice for the establishments of the Foreign Agentura. As a result, from its inception, the Okhrana’s

36 relationship with the French Surete was symbiotic.82 More importantly, the French authorities did not view the Foreign Agentura as either a threat to their jurisdiction or operational purpose.

The Training and Development of the Foreign Agentura Spies

The Foreign Agentura’s office was located in the basement of the two-story Russian

Consulate in Paris. Historians vary in their approximation of staff numbers. However, by most estimations, there were never more than five at any one time.83 The total number of operatives who were attached to the headquarters, from its beginnings under Paul Rachkovsky in 1885 to

March 1917 when the revolution terminated it, was almost one thousand.84 Throughout the thirty-two-year lifespan of foreign Okhrana, its cohort of “chinovniki” agents were handpicked for their posts by Fontanka in consultation with the chief of the Foreign Agentura.85 The identities of the personnel attached the Paris Office was known only by the directors of the

Okhrana, the incumbent Minister of Internal Affairs and the bureaucrats who worked separately for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Russian Consulate in Paris. Although the two heads of French police knew of the existence of the clandestine Agentura office, any information pertaining to the identity of specific agents would very rarely be disclosed to the top brass of the

Surete General or its Paris Prefecture.

The majority of the Agentura agents, who would work under Rachkovsky at the Paris

Office, were prepared for their careers as foreign espionage operatives by Sergei Zubatov. He was the Chief Moscow Okhrana’s “Special Section”, who worked with the Imperial secret police

82 Fisher, 7

83 Zuckerman, 87

84 ibid, 87

85 ibid, 90

37 from 1889 until 1903. In 1885, Zubatov left his life as a young student revolutionary and offered his services to the Okhrana as an informant. Five years later, he was chosen to enlist an officer within the Okhrana. Zubatov switched his allegiances because he did not agree with the violent trajectory of the activities which were perpetrated by his radicalized peers in response to

Alexander III’s heavy-handed, counter-revolutionary crackdown throughout the empire. Zubatov believed that widespread suppression of all opposition to the Tsar’s autocratic rule, would never fully extinguish the profound counter-cultural influence of the Russian intelligentsia. Instead, based on the experiences of his participation in the anti-tsarist movement as a student, he that the

Alexander III’s harsh subjugation of revolutionaries would only strengthen their resolve against the Tsar’s absolutist rule. Furthermore, Zubatov understood that the rabid zealotry of the

Okhrana, pushed the less militant away from political compromise toward an ardent devotion to the destruction of Russia’s existing Tsarist sociopolitical from abroad.

In 1885, as a result of the knowledge of an anti-tsarist revolutionary, Zubatov was given a role as an instructor in a new Okhrana cadet training division that was established through the

Moscow branch of the OO. The MVD created the school to train the first cohort of the Foreign

Agentura. Zubatov was granted the permission to tailor the curriculum to reflect his philosophy on how recruits of the Russian secret police were to be intellectually developed and successfully engaged in the clandestine surveillance tactics of the enemy of the state on foreign soil. Zubatov indoctrinated cadets in both political and revolutionary philosophies. He had two main criteria for the selection of new cadets. First, they need to understand the unique attraction to the revolutionary movement fully, or these recruits would be unable to combat the growing opposition. Second, he demanded that recruits should be drawn from the same social backgrounds from which the revolutionaries also came. As a result, he chose trainees from social

38 classes included students, factory workers, ethnic minorities such as Jews as well as members of the Russian aristocracy. The increased level of education among the Agentura’s cohort of spies gave them the tactical intellect to match the Russian émigré intelligentsia. In his testimony for the Provisional Government’s Investigating Commission in 1917, Okhrana officer M. S.

Komissarov boasted that having “intelligent people” and “university and graduates” singly handily gave the security police the upper hand against the liberal revolutionary movement.86

After the creation of the empire’s first international bureau in Paris, the Russian Ministry of the Interior (MVD) gave three primary directives to the new agents of the Okhrana’s Foreign

Agentura. First, they were obliged to work closely with the French authorities to conduct the surveillance of Russian revolutionaries arriving from Russia.87 Second, they were required to investigate all Russians with ties to European socialists and socialist groups.88 Third, agents were also tasked with discovering and eliminating all underground publishers of revolutionary propaganda as well as forgers of false identities and passports.89 When the Foreign Agentura was established, its agency focused on the surveillance of the Russian expatriate communities in

Paris. However, over the course of Alexander III and his successor Nicholas II (1894-1917) respective tenures as Tsar, the MVD’s use the agency gradually became intertwined with other critical aspects of Russian foreign policy toward Europe. Gradually, the Okhrana’s resources were used to aid the Ministry of War (Ministerstvo voyny or MB) in protecting the Empire against the potential hostile geopolitical intentions of rival European states such as Germany,

Austria and the Ottoman empire, whose respective governments the Russia mistrusted. As a

87 ibid,

88 Ibid

89 ibid

39 result, the Foreign Agentura’s outpost in Paris became the headquarters of Imperial Russia’s espionage network that was expanded across the continent.

The Expansion of the Foreign Agentura

During the first decade of the 20h century, which also coincided with the early periods of

Tsar Nicholas II’s tumultuous reign, the MVD established new satellite outposts of the Foreign

Agentura’s across Europe. Each of the new offices which were designed to function as subsidiaries to the agency’s Paris based headquarters and were integral to the surveillance of countries who shared borderland regions with the Russian empire. A new bureau called the

Balkans agency 90 was opened in Bucharest between 1900 and 1904 91 in order to monitor the political machinations in the volatile regions between Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian empire such as Serbia, Bulgaria as well as Macedonia. Also, in 1900, a Galician division92 was created to keep an eye on Polish nationalists in the Russian controlled Partition of Poland. The

Tsarist government feared that they would try to garner support for a Polish separatist movement within Germany in order to create an independent Polish state that incorporated the Imperial

Russian territory.

Also, in 1900, a Berlin Agentura 93 was also commissioned as crucial part of the MVD’s

Okhrana expansion scheme. The inauguration of this outpost was sanctioned because,

90 Lauchlan, 94

91 ibid, 101

92 ibid, 356

93 ibid, 101

40 increasingly after 1881, Germany became a center of Russian exile political activity.94 By the start of the 20th century, the city’s large and sympathetic working class presented a strong market for the sale of Russian political literature.95 The proceeds from this endeavor was a financial boon for exiled Russian revolutionaries, many whom had relocated to the German capital after they were hounded in Paris by agents of the Foreign Agentura. More significant, German industrial power had rapidly transformed the central European nation into a formidable military force. Germany’s evolution into potent hegemonic rival on the continent fueled Russia’s intense suspicion of its foreign policy initiatives. Following the failure of Russian diplomacy at the

Congress of Berlin in 1878, the view from within the empire was that Russian concessions to

Britain, Austria and Germany amounted to a formal abdication of its role as leader of the Slav peoples and Orthodoxy.96 Approximately three decades later, Russia remained entrenched in an intense contest for influence in the Balkans with these continental foes.

The Berlin Agentura was established to spy on high-ranking members of the German government and military corps. In addition, operatives who were attached to this outpost were also given orders to closely watch the prominent members of the Russian émigré intelligentsia, who resided among the large Russophone expatriate community in the German capital. However, the rationale behind the Okhrana’s surveillance of the Berlin based cohort of exiled Russian radicals differed from those which had influenced its reconnaissance activities in those who lived in Paris during the early 1880s. At the turn of the 20th century, the tsarist bureaucracy under

94 Williams, Robert C. "Russians in Germany 1900-1914." Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 4(October 1966), 121. Accessed November 12, 2018.

95 Zuckerman, Frederic S. The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad, 1st ed., 39. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

96 Ragsdale, Hugh, and Valerie Ponomarev, editors. Imperial Russian Foreign Policy. translated by Hugh Ragsdale, 1st ed., 243. London: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

41 Nicholas II, were fearful that these fugitive Russian extremists could be used by the rival

German state as instruments of state sponsored terrorism against the Imperial empire.

During the early 20th century expansion of Russia’s spy network, Italy had become a haven for members of the Russian émigré intelligentsia such as Valery Burtsev and Maxim

Gorky, who were also fugitives of the Okhrana. At that juncture, the Italian government had an official diplomatic alliance with both Germany and the Austria-Hungarian polity. More significantly, it also challenged Russia for hegemonic influence in the Balkans. From 1900, the nearby region had become an important territory in the scheme of Italy’s imperialist ambitions.

The combination of these issues magnified the threat Italy posed to the success of the geopolitical maneuverings of Nicholas’ government. Strangely, Russia did not open a branch of the Foreign Agentura in the southern Mediterranean state of Italy. While the Okhrana’s spy operations seemed to have flourished in France, Germany, Great Britain, as well as in the

Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, it seems to have lacked the required organizational prowess to infiltrate Italy. Why did Russia fail to open a division of Foreign Agentura in Italy, when it was able to successfully install them in these nearby regions?

Conclusion

The preceding segments of this chapter were devoted to providing important background historical information pertaining to the Okhrana’s functional evolution. From its inception in

1883, through to its eventual dissolution by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the agency became an integral component of the Russian monarchy’s coercive apparatus. In this chapter the tsarist tradition of creating secret agent organizations, discussed the origins of the Russian intelligentsia and its impact on political repression, outlined the creation of the Okhrana, and explained the

42 social and political factors that led to the creation of the Foreign Agentura. This chapter also provides the background historical information necessary to understand the case study analysis presented in the next chapter. This background data is necessary to understanding three key social and international geopolitical factors that influenced the spy agency’s integral role in the

Russian government’s early 20th century counterterrorism initiatives, which is discussed in

Chapter 3. First, Italy’s anti-Russian foreign policy fueled Russia’s bad diplomatic relations with

Italy from the early 1880s to World War I. Second, this poor geopolitical relationship hindered

Russia’s inability to formulate a police alliance with Italy that was advantageous to St.

Petersburg. Third, the evolution of Italy’s unique sociopolitical culture, especially under Prime

Minister Giovanni Giolitti, stymied the effectiveness of the Okhrana’s usual tactics of surveillance, espionage and counter-revolutionary propaganda.

43

Chapter 3: Italy as Case Study of the Foreign Agentura on the European Continent

Introduction

The primary goal of this thesis is to seek an explanation for Russia’s failure to open a division of the Foreign Agentura in Italy during its expansion of the Okhrana across Europe from

1900 till the commencement of World War I. Over this period, the fact that Italy challenged

Russian hegemony in the Balkans, further accentuates the atypical nature of the omission.

However, the successful installation of the Okhrana in nearby Berlin, Bucharest, and

Constantinople, may suggest that the Italian exclusion was a quotient of the organizational and operational limitations of Russian foreign espionage. By using Italy as a case study, this chapter will investigate three dynamics which often determined either the success or failure of the

Foreign Agentura’s counter-revolutionary initiatives in Europe during that timeframe. First, from the early 1880s to the start of World War I. Italian government regimes maintained an the overtly anti-Russian foreign policy agenda which fueled Italy’s bad diplomatic relationship with Russia.

Second, Italian geopolitical hostility toward Russia hindered the tsarist bureaucracy’s ability to formulate a police alliance with Italy that was advantageous to St. Petersburg. Third, the evolution of Italy’s unique sociopolitical culture, especially under Prime Minister Giovanni

Giolitti, (1901-1914), stymied the effectiveness of the Okhrana’s usual tactics of surveillance, espionage and counter-revolutionary propaganda.

Throughout this third chapter, my intentions are to use this historical analysis to help isolate the specific reasons for Russia's inability to put the Okhrana in Italy. Also, I wish to use

44 the findings from this investigation to support my argument that Russia was not immune to experiencing major organizational setbacks that limited the Foreign Agentura’s ability to fulfill its foreign-policy objectives in Europe. Ultimately, I hope that this thesis could help shift the historiographical assessment of the Okhrana’s international wing toward a new trajectory by using my discoveries to counterbalance the propensity of Russian scholars to inaccurately over embellish the it's prowess as an espionage agency. In the subsequent paragraphs of this case- study, I will examine three sociopolitical factors that played a crucial role in Russia’s failure to expand its international spy network into Italy as it did into other European states between 1900 and 1914. These influences include Italy’s distinctive “anti-Russian” foreign policy, the unique evolution of Italy’s internal policing apparatus, and the peculiarity of Italian cultural attitudes toward terrorism, Russian/Russophone immigrants as well as the Russian émigré intelligentsia.

Italy’s “anti-Russian” foreign policy and its influence on the Foreign Agentura

In this section, I will argue that Russia’s inability to open an outpost of the Okhrana in

Italy was directly linked to the Italian government’s distinctive “anti-Russian” foreign policy from the early 1880s to till 1914. During this timeframe, which coincided with the pre-World

War I evolution of Foreign Agentura’s espionage activities in Europe, the inhospitable geopolitical rapport between the two countries torpedoed the tsarist government’s attempts to replicate the successful Franco-Russian alliance against Russian anarchism with Italy. Prior to the 1880s, the failures of the Third Section were exacerbated by Russia’s poor diplomatic relationship with European powers. During Alexander II’s rule, Russian police officials were often unsuccessful in capturing extremists who had escaped beyond the empire’s border into

Europe. Foreign governments were often reluctant to acquiesce to Russia’s requests to arrest these targets of the Third Section. In the late 1870s, Geneva had become the base for anarchist

45 groups such as the Narodnaya Volya (or The People’s Will), who planned terrorist attacks against Tsarist officials. However, Swiss authorities often refuse to deliberate with the Russian government about these organizations. Instead, they resisted extraditing anyone charged with the commission of a political crime and its dilatory behavior discomforted the tsarist regime to no end.97 Prior to the 1880s, Russia also encountered similar frustrations with the respective governments of Great Britain, Germany and France.

In the early 1880s, Alexander III’s crackdown on all forms of anti-tsarist activity forced revolutionaries to flee into to Europe in greater numbers. On the continent, some discovered relatively greater freedom in the West to engage in anti-regime activities.98 When Alexander approved V.K. Plehve’s plan to put a permanent Okhrana division overseas, he understood that its success would require Russia to seek the approval of European leaders in order to do so. As a result, diplomatic relationship with states would have significant influence on its ability to use the Foreign Agentura overseas. In the sections below, I show how the evolution of Russia’s diplomatic relationship with European powers such as France, Germany and Austria aided the success of the Okhrana on the continent. At the same time, Italy’s hostile and adversarial attitude toward the Russian government, especially during the majority of Giovanni Giovanni’s tenure as

Prime Minister, underscored the impotence of the Foreign Agentura on the Italian peninsula.

Alexander III

In the early 1880s, the Russian government took advantage of France's precarious geopolitical situation, which was adeptly employed to initiate the growth of a diplomatic alliance

97 Zuckerman, 59

98 Fisher, 2

46 between them. At the time, the French government was fearful of its inability to counteract potential German military aggression. Alexander III saw that, despite their inhospitable relations for much of the 19th century, France would now view Russia as an invaluable ally because they wished “to obtain the support of the Imperial army against Germany’s eastern frontiers in time of war.”99 As a result, Alexander III sanctioned the decision to begin negotiations for a potential

France-Russian alliance against anarchism with the French President Jules Grevy's regime. The

Tsar, did so despite the protests of his Foreign Minister N. K. Giers, who was adamant that

Plehve’s idea that Russian Consuls would carry out higher level observation of the émigrés abroad100 could cause an international embarrassment for the empire. However, MVD director T.

A. Ignataev was convinced that the French police’s decision to arrest Peter Kropotkin for propagandizing among French factory workers in Lyon in 1882101 was an indication that the

French had begun to see the Russian intelligentsia activity as a serious problem. Ignatov’s interpretation was correct and the French allowed his ministry to create the ‘Paris Office’; a year later (1883). The creation of the Okhrana’s continental headquarters was a sign of their desperation to secure Russia’s friendship. In February 1880, a young member of the Narodnaya

Volia named Lev Gartman fled to France to avoid capture from agents of the Third Section for his alleged participation in attempted assassination of the Tsar at the Winter Palace. The explosion killed eleven imperial guards and wounded thirty others. Alexander and his family were set to have dinner with his nephew Alexander Joseph.102 Without consulting the French

99 Jelavich, 214

100 Zuckerman, 80

101 ibid, 59

102 Alexander Joseph or Alexander of Battenberg was officially titled as the Prince of Bulgaria. He ruled the district from 1879 until 1886.

47 Ministry of the Interior, Gartman was arrested by the French police, who then refused to sanction

Russia’s request for his extradition.103

During Tsar Alexander’s thirteen-year reign, the steady growth in the strength of the

Franco-Russian diplomatic rapport prolonged the existence of the Paris Office headquarters.

Over this time period, intelligence strategists within the MVD were astutely cognizant of the

French government’s desperate reliance on the international perception that a military alliance was the foundation of their inter-state friendship. For this reason, Russia could ensure the longevity of the Okhrana’s base by leveraging French fear of the motives of German, Austrian and British foreign policy initiatives. The peaceful nature of the accord between the two countries also allowed Rachkovsky to develop the Foreign Agentura’s organizational identity and modus operandi in the French capital (discussed further in the third section of this chapter).

This specific location of the agency was of vital importance because, during the 1880s, the City of Light had become the hub for Russian revolutionary groups operating in much of Europe.104

Throughout his early stewardship, Rachkovsky was able to gradually improve the efficiency of the Okhrana’s surveillance of the Russian community in the French capital. In 1890, its prowess was manifested by the Agentura’s central role in the capture of Peter Lavrov, a member of the infamous Narodnaya Volya terrorist sect, who at the time was the most prestigious Russian radical living in Paris.105 During that period, the Agentura’s agents impressively seized approximately 6,000 copies of various revolutionary publications.106 Also, the tsarist Ministry of

Justice brought 159 suspects to trial based on the evidence supplied by Rachkovsky and the

103 Zuckerman, 57

104 Fisher, 2

106 Zuckerman, 137

48 courts convicted 59 of them.107 By the end of Alexander III's rule, the establishment of an official Franco-Russian Alliance on January 4th 1894, allowed for the Paris Office to remain as the focal point of Okhrana operations on the continent through to the end of the century.

Alexander III’s decision to take advantage of France's apprehension over its military inferiority to Germany, represented a success in Russian statecraft which benefitted the tsarist government’s ability to deploy the Okhrana overseas. However, throughout his time as Tsar,

Alexander’s strategic manipulation of France would not have created a similarly beneficial alliance with Italy. On May 20, 1882, Italy had joined Germany and the Habsburg Empire in forming a Triple Alliance,108 which mandated that they were expected to provide military backing should France and Russia fight Germany and Austria-Hungary.109 Per the terms of this agreement, Italy did not have a hostile enemy against whom the Russian government could offer protection other than France. A possible French insurrection against Italy was problematic for the foreign policy interests of government of Alexander III because a Franco-Italian clash would ultimately drag Russia into an unnecessary conflict with Germany and Austria. Without the advantage of this geopolitical leverage, Rachkovsky would not be able to force a similar police alliance between the Foreign Agentura, and the Italian Ministry of the Interior’s Department of

Public Security.

During my archival research in Italy, I was unable to locate any correspondences between the two agencies which originated during the period of Alexander III’s reign (1881-1894).

However, cooperation between the Okhrana and the Italian ministry was indeed possible in that

107 Millard, 149

108 Jelavich, Barbara. St. Petersburg and Moscow: Tsarist and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1814-1974, 1st ed., 197. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.

109 ibid, 197

49 period. Within the files I studied, I found written evidence that the Italian Ministry of the

Internal Affairs was tracking the movements of an “alleged Russian suspect” (seditente sudduto russo) named Vladimir Andreyevich across the country prior to Alexander II’s assassination. 110

In January 1880, a hand-written telegraph was addressed to the Italian Ministry of Foreign

Affairs concerning Andreyevich, who they claimed operated in Italy under the pseudonyms

Federico Millingen and Osman-Bey. 111 In addition to this file, I discovered a number of hand- written police reports, which provided reconnaissance information on Andreyevich’s whereabouts. Each of these missives were sent separately to the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ head office in Rome from the police department in Venice (31 July 1880), Naples (28 July 1883) and from Udine (27 December 1891). 112 I was unable to locate Vladimir Andreyevich’s name within the Hoover Institute’s Okhrana archive, nor the GARF repository of letters the Moscow

Okhrana intercepted which were sent by Russian revolutionaries. However, along with these files, I observed two pamphlets in which he was organizing “nihilist” conferences to discuss the death of Alexander II as evidence that he indeed was fomenting revolutionary activity in Italy were cited as the reason for the Italian government’s surveillance.113

The death of Alexander III saw the end of a great period of Russian diplomacy in the

19th century. 114 His brutal political repression of the Russian intelligentsia, which was

110 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

111 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

112 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

113 ibid

114 Jelavich, 221

50 spearheaded by the Okhrana, stonewalled the monarchy’s collapse, which seemed inevitable after his father’s shocking assassination in 1881. Although Alexander III’s rapid restoration of his absolute rule was made possible by his barbarous political, religious and ethnic persecution of the Russian people, he quickly gained the respect and admiration of the European aristocratic elite. In 1894, he left a Russian empire with an excellent international prestige, which was a quotient of a combination of his father’s despotic rule at home and political savvy in the arena of foreign diplomacy. Arguably, one of Alexander III’s most important political act may have been his decision to allow Count Loris-Melikov to continue his overhaul of Russia’s ineffective internal police despite its failure to save his father’s life. Melikov’s transfprmations led directly to the creation of the Okhrana.

Alexander’s approval of the Director of Department of Police, V.K. Plehve’s desire to develop an oversees based Okhrana division to specifically eliminate the revolutionary threat of the Russian émigré intelligentsia, resulted in the creation of the Foreign Agentura. During his tenure as Tsar, the importance of that international mission made the espionage agency into a crucial bureaucratic component of Russian foreign policy, which in turn granted Rachkovsky considerable autonomy to mold it. However, as I explained in the previous sections, the success of its counter-terrorist tactics relied heavily on the cooperation with the governments of the territories in which Agentura agents operated. As a result, it was no coincidence that the majority of Rachkovsky’s best accomplishments occurred in Paris. The French authorities were willing to support the Okhrana’s operation in exchange for Russia’s military support.

Alexander’s rule coincided with a sustained period relative to geopolitical peace and countries such as Germany and Austria were able to work with Russian authorities despite their respective affiliations to antipodal inter-regional pacts (such as the Triple Alliance).

51 However, by the end of Alexander III’s reign, Russia and Britain still had a deeply antagonistic diplomatic rapport. which stymied Rachkovsky’s desire to initiate the development of a similar type of cooperation with British authorities over the increased Russian intelligentsia activity in London. In January 1891, he secretly made a trip to the English capital in a valiant attempt to persuade the British police to grant the Foreign Agentura permission to arrest Valery

Burtsev and Stepniak-Kravchinskii. Rachkovsky had received intelligence that these two key figures in the Narodnaya Volya’s militant wing (Boevina Organisatzii or Battle Organization)115 were organizing the collection of funds, some of which were being used to support other groups such as the “nihilists”116 in Paris.117 However, several months after the futile trip the Foreign

Agentura’s director had accepted that he could not eliminate the London based cohort of the

Russian émigré intelligentsia because help from the British authorities could not be counted on.118 Under Alexander III, Italy could not provide similar organizational freedoms to the

Okhrana because Russia had become the closest ally of its most bitter rival., France. In the subsequent segment, I will explain why Russia’s dependence on the benevolence of foreign governments further undermined its ability to use the Foreign Agentura effectively in the early

20th century.

115 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

116 ibid

117 Zuckerman, 140-141

118 Zuckerman, 140-141

52 Nicholas II

During Nicholas II’s tenure as Tsar, Europe experienced an upsurge in anarchist activity which his government attempted to use to convince other countries to work with the Foreign

Agentura. Up to that point, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 stunned Europe to be sure, but it did not drive Europeans to support Count Louis Melikov’s call for an international agreement directed against anarchism.119 Following the assassination of French President Sadi

Carnot in 1894, Rachkovsky was able to initiate a relationship between the Paris Office and the

Berlin Police Presidium, which eventually led to the official establishment of the Berlin

Agentura in 1900.120 However, the growth of a Russo-German police alliance was conditioned by geopolitical climate during the 1890s, in which all of the governments showed a determination to settle matters peacefully.121 Neither Nicholas II nor the tsarist government could manipulate foreign governments to do so in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Empress

Elizabeth of Austria in 1898.

Elizabeth I’s assassination led to the organization of an international conference against anarchism in Rome (24 November to 21 December, 1898), in which 54 delegates representing the whole of Europe attended.122 One noteworthy political outcome from the symposium was the creation of an Anti-Anarchist Protocol which was strongly influenced by the Russian delegation’s desire to initiate the promulgation of an international agreement on the handling of anarchism by Europe’s forces of law and order.123 Despite Russian authorities hopes to lead a

119 ibid, 60

120 Lauchlan, 356

121 Jelavich, 225

123 ibid

53 pan European anti-anarchist coalition, serious formal cooperation proved illusory for Russia’s

Department of Police.124 French Ambassador Camille Barrère, who headed his country’s contingent at the conference, wrote in a letter that its propositions possessed no more value than

“the paper they were written on.”125 The conference only brought tangible support for Russia’s counter-revolutionary agenda from Austria which was not a significant geopolitical victory for

Russian statecraft. A year before the Habsburg monarch’s death, the former opponents agreed to cooperate to maintain the status quo by fostering a mutually beneficial foreign policy of non- aggression.126 Throughout Nicholas II’s tenure, Russia’s close diplomatic relationship with

France continued to have a significant influence on the use of the foreign Agentura. The Tsar visited France in 1896 and the French President visited Russia in 1897. Unfortunately, the

Franco -Russian alliance remained strong because of the Triple Alliance and it eventually forced a technologically outdated Russian imperial army into war with a superior Germany in 1914.

French economic investment continued to be a source of their diplomatic relationship by the start of the conflict approximately 2 billion dollars in French money was in Russian hands.127

As a result, during the post neither Rachkovsky nor his successors were able to use anarchist political assassinations to persuade the Italian government to allow the Foreign

Agentura to operate as it did in France. Unlike in the French case, Russian statecraft was stymied by the hostile anti-tsarist nature of Italian foreign policy since it joined the Triple Alliance in the early 1880s. Although French president Marie Francois Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death by an

124 ibid

125 Jensen, 132

126 ibid, 226

127 Jelavich, 233

54 Italian anarchist named Santi Geronimo Cesario,128 Italy’s refusal to work with Russia perhaps stemmed from the French contemplated military retaliation on Rome.129 After Italian Luigi

Lucheni killed Elizabeth I of Austria, the Italian government only had intentions to work with

Switzerland.130 They were only persuaded to organize the Rome conference because the Austro-

Hungarian Foreign Minister Goluchowski asked them to do so.131 He suggested to the Italians that “they not limit their diplomatic initiative to Switzerland but give it a more universal character, involving all European states in the struggle against anarchism.”132 The Italian governments from Prime Ministers Marco Minghetti (1873-1876) to Giovanni Giolitti (1911-

1914) were not willing to jeopardize the relationship because “the British controlled the

Mediterranean, and the long Italian coastline made the peninsula vulnerable”.133

Following the assassination of their own monarch Umberto II in 1900, the Italian government under Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (1901-1914) employed a world-wide network of secret agents who kept him informed about anarchist intentions.134 For much of the pre-World War I years, Italy primarily relied on its own police to deal with any potential issue which could be caused by the Russian intelligentsia in across the country. During this period,

Italian foreign policy strategies hindered any full cooperation from the Italian government in

128 Pernicone, Nunzio. Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892, 1st ed., 288. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.

129 Chabod, Federico. Italian Foreign Policy: The Statecraft of the Founders. Translated by William McCuaig, 1st ed., 89. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996.

130 Jensen, 145

131 ibid

132 Jensen, 145

133 Di Scala, 201-202

134 Zuckerman, 19

55 helping the Foreign Agentura’s counter-revolutionary activities on the peninsula. Like Russia,

Italy also had a strong interest in gaining both influence and territory in the nearby Balkans region. In 1901, the Italian government made a pact that it would help ‘work toward autonomy for Albania.’135 Secretly, between 1902 and 1914, Italy actually had plans to seize the province whenever there was a Balkans crisis.136 These imperial desires for land across the Adriatic Sea were one of the factors why the Italian state went to war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911,137 and worked against Russian interests during the First and Second Balkans Wars.138

Based on the archival files I surveyed during my research in Italy, I saw very few examples of direct intergovernmental correspondences between Italy and Russia during Nicholas

II’s reign. One noteworthy example of these exchanges was a highly confidential document which was sent from the Russian embassy in Paris to the Italian Internal Ministry’s “Department of Foreign Affairs” (Ministero degli affari esteri) on October 27, 1911.139 This telegram was sent on behalf of the Russian ambassador to Paris to inform the Italian authorities that the “Grand

Duke of Russia” would be travelling to Italy under the pseudonym Count (Conte) Michele

Brassow.140 The document also requested the assistance of the Italian police in providing him protection during an automobile journey from Sicily to a private residence on Via di Ventimiglia.

135 Lowe and Marzari, 100

136 ibid

137 The Italian-Turkish War occurred from September 29th 1911 and October 18th 1912.

138 First Balkans War (October 8th ,1912- May 30th ,1913), Second Balkans War (June 29th-August 10th, 1913)

139 Zuckerman, Fredric Scott. “The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society: 1880-1917.1st ed., 25. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

140 ibid, 25

56 (See: Appendix 5).141 Ventimiglia was a small resort town located near Liguria’s border with

France, approximately 100 miles to the southwest of Genoa.

Between 1900 and World War I, Russian foreign policy toward Europe failed to effectively deal with the demands of a geopolitical climate that grew increasingly hostile year after year. French foreign policy during the 1880s and 1890s remained focus on creating an alliance against the Germans. The close relationship with Russia was invaluable because they wished “to obtain the support of the Imperial against Germany’s eastern frontiers in time of war”.142 Likewise, in the early 1890s Russia could not afford to stand alone, particularly in the face of the Triple Alliance working together. 143 Their diplomatic rapport allowed the Foreign

Agentura to continue with the headquarter in the city with the largest émigré population in

Europe. The stability of the Franco-Russian geopolitical relationship allowed the Foreign

Agentura stability which gave Rachkovsky an opportunity to enhance the image of the Russian secret service.

However, under Nicholas II, the tsarist government operated as if the peaceful period under his predecessor (Alexander III) has continued uninterrupted since the 1880s. Although the

Foreign Agentura’s importance to the survival of the monarchy grew exponentially during this period, the agency’s success remained inextricably linked to the strength of Russia’s alliances with foreign countries. Also, despite the failure of the Rome Conference in 1898, the tsarist government of Nicholas II remained stupidly committed to the early 1880s goal of creating an international alliance against anarchism. This naive initiative remained a priority for Nicholas II

141 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

142 Jelavich, 214

143 ibid, 219

57 as the Russian Agentura was expanded to ensure that rival European governments in state- sponsored terrorism would not use people such as Vladimir Lenin. However, the Revolution of

1905 and the October Revolution in 1917 were both orchestrated by the Russian émigré intelligentsia from abroad. Once the Italian government under Giolitti decided to place the

Balkans region as part of its ambitious imperialist project, the likelihood that they would help the

Russian government to deal with the debilitating effects of its émigré intelligentsia's terrorism was extremely low. In the following segment, I shall discuss how Russia’s inter-agency police alliances were a catalyst for the eventual failure of the Foreign Agentura by WW I, as the

European political climate became infused with poisonous interstate hegemonic rivalries.

Lack of Inter-agency Police Cooperation and its Influence on the Foreign Agentura

In this section, I demonstrate the second aspect of my argument, which is to show that

Russia’s inability to open an outpost of the Okhrana in Italy was also directly linked to Russia’s inability replicate inter-agency cooperation with Italy, which was as advantageous to St.

Petersburg. the Franco-Russian police alliance. Until the reconfiguration of the Russian police in the early 1880s, French governments monitored the actions and thoughts of their population more closely and consistently than any other European system.144 Prior to 1883, there was no mutual interest between Russia’s Department of Police and the French Surete Générale (French

Internal Security Division) in the sharing of intelligence regarding Russian anarchist activity in

France. Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin escaped from Russia in 1876 prior to his trial for his participation in an underground anti-tsarist group called the Circle of Tchaikovsky.145 He spent

144 Zuckerman, 8

145 ibid, 52

58 the majority of his subsequent forty-year exile in France where he was extremely influential in the country’s various anarchist movements. Kropotkin was arrested by French authorities for his revolutionary activities in 1882 and was subsequently jailed in Lyon for five years.146 Two years prior to the Russian anarchist infamous arrest, the Russian and the French government were at odds over the bold refusal of the latter to extradite young Narodnaya Volia terrorist Lev Gartman back to St. Petersburg. In the subsequent paragraphs of this section, I shall explain how the

Franco-Russian police alliance between the Okhrana and French Surete General was a catalyst for the early success of the Foreign Agentura during the first decade of Peter Rachkovsky. I will also show that Russia’s inability to replicate the relationship between the Foreign Agentura and the Paris Prefecture was the primary reason for its failure to open an outpost of the Foreign

Agentura in Italy.

Alexander III

The total number of operatives who were attached to the headquarters from its beginnings under Rachkovsky in 1885 to March 1917, when the revolution terminated it, was almost one thousand.147 Throughout his directorship period under Tsar Alexander III (1885-1894), the

Foreign Agentura benefitted tremendously from its alliance with the Sûreté Generale of France.

More specifically, the international Okhrana’s cooperation with its legendary subsidiary branch

Paris Prefecture of Police that laid the foundations for the Agentura’s early success on the continent. By the time Rachkovsky officially took control of the Paris Office, the Prefecture was widely acknowledged as one of the premier police institutions in Europe. In 1871, the Paris

146 Zuckerman, 52

147 ibid, 52

59 police earned plaudits among the European ruling elite for its pivotal role in restoring civil order during the seventy day mob rule of the Paris Commune. The Paris Prefecture was at the center of the French government’s crusade to restore civil order in the capital in the subsequent months. In the aftermath of the Commune, the government took harsh repressive action: about 38,000 were arrested and more than 7,000 were deported. 148 By the early 1880s, the French police agency had jurisdiction of an overcrowded, crime riddled, multi ethnic French capital, which grew from

546,846 (1801) to 2,269023 (1881).149 The Prefecture’s commissioner, who was given the bureaucratic title of the Prefect of Paris, served as the most important non-military security official in the French empire. As from is control of the largest urban police brigad in the country, the duties of the Prefect included organizing response strategies to natural catastrophes including fires, floods, and epidemics outbreaks. The Prefect of Paris was also given tremendous executive powers to apply and enforce the execution of laws as well as regulations concerning public health, public morality, and public security and the proper conduct of hotels and brothels, churches and theatres, gambling houses, and (foreign currency) exchanges.150

During Alexander III’s reign, Rachkovsky worked closely with Louis Lepine, the Paris

Prefect, who admired the English police for its ability to foster the image of the police as the protector of the public good.151 As a result, during the Frenchman’s tenure 1883-1905, he

148 "Commune of Paris." Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed May 8, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/event/Commune-of-Paris-1871.

149 Chevalier, Louis. Classes Laborieuses Et Classes Dangereuses a Paris Pendant la Premiere Moitie Du XIX Siecle, 1st ed.,182. London: Routledge, 1973.

150 Chapman, Brian. "Police Science: The Prefecture of Police." Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 44, no. 4 (1954), 505-507. Accessed July 9, 2019. https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4170&context=jclc.

151 Zuckerman, 12

60 preferred to avoid the use of repressive police tactics in the French capital. Instead, Lepine set up his brigade to control the streets and conduct intense surveillance on any individual or group considered a potential source of disorder.152 In the first decade of the Foreign Agentura’s existence, Rachkovsky was cognizant of the need to ingratiate himself with the director of the

Paris police in order to achieve his objective of eradicating anti-tsarist elements in Paris. As result, during the reign of Alexander III’s rule (1881-1894), he openly mimicked the modus operandi of Paris Prefecture because the location of the agency was crucial as, during the 1880s, the City of Light had become the hub for Russian revolutionary groups operating in much of

Europe.153 Despite the lack of familiarity between the two agencies, from its inception, the

Okhrana’s relationship with the French Surete was symbiotic.154 Fortunately, the French authorities did not view the Russian agency as either a threat to their jurisdiction or operational purpose. After the creation of the Okhrana headquarters in Paris, the Russian Ministry of the

Interior (MVD) gave three primary directives to the agents of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agentura.

First, they were obliged to work closely with the French authorities to conduct the surveillance of

Russian revolutionaries arriving from Russia.155 Second, they were required to investigate all

Russians with ties to European socialists and socialist groups.156 Third, agents were also tasked with discovering and eliminating all underground publishers of revolutionary propaganda as well as forgers of false identities and passports.157 At home, the Sûreté Generale regularly

152 Zuckerman, 12

153 Fisher, 2

154 ibid, 7

155 ibid, 9

156 ibid

157 Fisher, 9

61 perlustrated the mail of its suspects by bribing postmen and concierges to supply it with letters written by or to people under suspicion.158 Throughout this period, Rachkovsky followed the

Paris Prefecture’s lead and was able to build the strength of the Okhrana’s surveillance of the

Russian immigrant community residing in the French capital. In that timeframe, the Agentura’s agents seized approximately 6,000 copies of various revolutionary publications.159 Also, the tsarist Ministry of Justice brought 159 suspects to trial based on the evidence supplied by

Rachkovsky and the courts convicted 59 of them.160 As a result of his success during the first decade of the Okhrana’s existence as Russia’s primary foreign spy agency, Rachkovsky’s annual budget had mushroomed to a stupendous 295,500 francs in 1894. No Foreign Agentura budget would match this sum for another 12 years.161 Russian archival documents also indicate the

Okhrana in Russian had adopted a similar tactical strategy over the course of Alexander III’s rule. These GARF files were collected by the Okhrana’s ‘Special Section’ in St. Petersburg

(Fifth Department of the Special Section of the Department of Police (secret unit). Between 1883 and 1894, these Russian language letters were organized and filed by date, month and year, per the orders of The Department of Police of the Imperial Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. 162

During Alexander III’s rule as the Russian king (1881-1894), it was extremely difficult for the Foreign Agentura to replicate the success of the Franco-Russian police alliance against

158 Zuckerman, 5

159 ibid, 137

160 Millard, 149

161 Zuckerman, 142

162 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

62 the Russian intelligentsia elsewhere on the European continent. Beginning in the early 1880s, the

Berlin Police Presidium had already begun to compile a register of political suspects and were sending undercover agents to report on their activities.163 However, in these years, political policing as a systemized task was. something rather new to Germany.164 Throughout Alexander

III’s tenure, the British government considered the Okhrana little more than an extension of tsarist tyranny.165 Astonishingly, by the early 1890s, they only had a small political police unit called the “Special Branch” which only employed 25 agents that were designated toward surveillance of the revolutionary émigré population. During the 1880s, the Italian police system struggled mightily to tackle the endemic criminality, rampant anarchist violence and a volatile peasant population that had besieged the country. While the Okhrana’s counter revolutionary initiatives flourished at home and in France (with its cooperation of the Surete Generale), the

Italian police force was too disorganized to handle its assignments.166 In addition, technical backwardness made record keeping and the identification of suspects a nightmare. 167 During my archival research in Italy, I discovered that the majority of police correspondences (sent during the 1880s and early 1890s were handwritten and almost illegible. (See Appendix 1 and 2). The inefficiency of the Italian police or Carabinieri in solving this social discord was caused by three problems. First, unlike Russia and France, the Italian government favored the use of non-

163 Zuckerman, 23

164 ibid

165 Zuckerman, 140

166 ibid, 18

167 Ibid

63 specialist- army units for political policing.168 Second, since the 1870s, standard day-to- day policing was entrusted to a much smaller and less adequate bodies of men from the Carabinieri’s civil police force called the Public Security Guards, which by the late 1880s numbered only 169

Third, by the 1880s, the government spent only two percent of gross public expenditure on policing while in comparison, it used devoted twenty percent to military and naval expenditure.

170 In addition to the geopolitical enmity between Italy and Russia, the philosophical and organizational structure of the Italian police system perhaps inhibited inter agency police cooperation between the Okhrana and Carabinieri during Alexander III’s reign. In the following section, I shall explain how these different styles of pollical policing obstructed the creation of an inter-agency alliance between Russian and Italy during the reign of Nicholas II.

Nicholas II

Nicholas II became Tsar at age twenty-six after his father Alexander III passed away from renal failure due to a kidney disease in 1894. In foreign affairs, Nicholas had inherited from his father the French alliance, of whose existence he learned only after his accession to the throne.171 However, Nicholas immediately understood the prudence of maintaining close geopolitical relationship between Russia and France. For this reason, he would visit France in

1896, host the French president Felix Faure in St. Petersburg a year later (1897) and sanctioned an agreement in 1899, which would extend their military partnership indefinitely. Nicholas’

168 Davis, John A. Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy., 232. London: Macmillan International Higher Education, 1988.

169 ibid, 233

170 ibid

64 strategic decision to further strengthen their diplomatic coalition during the early years of his tenure, helped to further solidify the cooperation between the Okhrana and the Surete Generale.

As a result, during the first decade of his rule, the French police service, especially the Prefecture of Paris, became the most cooperative of all Peter Rachkovsky’s allies.172 He remained as the

Foreign Agentura’s director for an extra eight years (1894-1906) because Nicholas II considered him to be one of the most devoted protectors of the regime and dynasty.173 During this period,

Rachkovsky used his position as the head of the Okhrana’s international wing primarily to enhance his political reputation and prestige in Russia. He also became close acquaintances with several powerful individuals. Within the Russian government, among his most influential friends he acquired within Nicholas II’s cohort of tsarist government advisors included, I. L Gromeykin,

(Minister of the Interior), Sergei Witte (Minister of Finance, General P.P Hesse (Imperial Court

Commandant), Baron Morenheim (Russian Ambassador to France) and Sergei Zubatov (Director of the Department of Police)

By the time Nicholas II took the throne (1894), the Okhrana had among other triumphs, uncovered a plot to kill Tsar Alexander III (1887), arrested Peter Lavrov, the most prestigious

Russian radical living in Paris (1890) and turned a top Narodnaya Volia member named Lev

Tikhomirov into a paid, Paris-based informant. Over the course of his reign, the tsarist government would attempt to replicate the successful the counter-revolutionary joint venture between the Foreign Agentura and the Paris Prefecture elsewhere on the continent. Its desire to expand the Okhrana’s operations in Europe had three stages/categories. In stage one, the Russian government used official diplomatic channels to create an international alliance against

172 Zuckerman, 127

173 ibid, 145

65 anarchism which would subsequently create an inter-agency police cooperation with the Okhrana against Russian revolutionaries abroad. In the second stage, they took the initiative to establish a relationship with high ranking police officials in the European countries in which the Russian

émigré intelligentsia lived in exile. The third stage, the Okhrana’s “Special Section” would clandestinely deploy Okhrana agents across the continent without the knowledge of the foreign governments.

During Nicholas II ‘s rule (1894-1917), the only country in category one would be

France. The diplomatic cooperation between Russia and France, which began under his father in the early 1880s, ensured that counter-revolutionary collaboration between the Foreign Agentura and the Paris Prefecture remained intact. The Franco-Russian geopolitical alliance ensured that their partnership allowed the Paris Office to remain the operational headquarters of the Foreign

Agentura during its expansion from 1900 until it was disbanded by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

Germany is an example of the second category of the Foreign Agentura’s expansion. Following the assassination of French President Sadi Carnot in 1894, Rachkovsky was able to initiate a relationship between the Paris Office and the Berlin Police Presidium, which eventually led to the official establishment of the Berlin Agentura in 1900.174 Under the reign of his successors,

Leonid Rataev ( 1902-1905), Arkady Harting (1905-1909) and Alexander Krassilinikov (1909-

1917), the Berlin Agentura primarily concerned itself with keeping track of Russian émigré in

Germany by bribing high ranking police officials such as the German Police Commissioner.175

Britain, Austria, the Ottoman empire and Italy, each fell into the third category of the

174 Lauchlan, 356

175 Zuckerman, 157

66 international expansion of the foreign Okhrana. Throughout his leadership of the agency,

Rachkovsky’s attempts to foster a police alliance with the British police were repeatedly rebuffed. Also, in 1900, the opening of a Galician division 176 of the Okhrana’s Foreign

Agentura was sanctioned by the MVD. The most significant goal of this department was to expose underground sects of Polish anarchists, separatists and socialist revolutionaries who may have been attempting to garner support against the Russian state within both the Habsburg empire and Germany. A Balkan Agency 177 was established in Bucharest between 1900 and 1904.

Its chief purpose was to keep an eye on Russian emigrants in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania.178

This secret department was also created for the tsarist government to observe the diplomatic machinations within their respective semi-autonomous Austro-Hungarian states.

From around 1907, the British government began to seek improved relations with

Tsardom,179 and eventually joined both Russian and France in the Triple Entente that would combat the Triple Alliance during World War I. However, despite this shift in Anglo-Russian diplomatic ties, the Okhrana still had agents who were working from the office of a ‘cover firm’ called the “Russian Imperial Financial Agency”,180 between 1906 and 1909. In 1911, another version of the Balkan Agentura was commissioned in Constantinople.181 The spies within this

176 Lauchlan, 356

177 Lauchlan, 94

178 ibid, 104

179 Senese, Donald, S.M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii. The London Years. Russian Biography Series 33., 64-65. Newtonville Massachusetts: Oriental Research Partners, 1987.

180 Lauchlan, 103

181 ibid, 104

67 new agency were sent to observe the domestic affairs within the devolving Ottoman polity which had very close relations with Great Britain. In addition, they were also specifically looking into

Turkey’s connections to Russian subjects involved in Pan-Islamist, Pan Turkish and Pan-

Armenian nationalist organizations such as the ‘Gnchak’ and ‘Dashnaktsutiun’.182

During the reign of Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917), there were three primary reasons for the tsarist government’s failure to forge an inter-agency alliance between the Foreign Agentura and the Italian Carabinieri. First, over the course of Nicholas’ first decade his rule, the Italian police system struggled mightily to tackle the endemic criminality, rampant anarchist violence and a volatile peasant population that had besieged the country. Unlike in both Russia and

France, the Italian government gave the task of political policing to its military corps. Therefore, as a result, the Okhrana was not was not an organizational fit in Italy because it was a subsidiary of the Russian Department of Police. Second, over that same time frame, the Carabinieri received considerably less funding than the Italian police. The lack of financial support was the source of the agency’s inherent technological backwardness, which made both record keeping and the identification of suspects a nightmare.183 Also during these years, the Italians still lacked a professionalized detective force, made little of use of forensic photography, the telephone or the telegraph in fighting crime. 184 Third, by the start of World War I, the Italian government had modernized its internal police to such a level that it perhaps did not need the assistance of the

Okhrana to help them keep track of Russian terrorists in their country. During Giovanni Giolitti’s successive stints as Italian Prime Minister (1901-1914), the international prestige of the

Carabinieri grew exponentially. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Italian government

182 Lauchlan, 104

184 ibid

68 established a new police academy in Rome and began to incorporate the Bertillon method of criminal identification into its police practices. This criminological system, which was already widely used throughout the continent, identified police suspects through the use of physical descriptions that were supplemented with a photograph. Also, during this period, the Giolitti government installed photographic equipment as well as laboratories in major police precincts throughout the country. By 1914, these technological upgrades to allowed Italian state to have one of the most advanced police systems on the continent at its disposal.

During my archival research in Italy, I discovered several police documents which indicate that the Giolitti regime had become quite proficient in monitoring fugitive Russian

émigré revolutionaries between 1900 and the start of World War I. The classification of these confidential files show that the observing Russians was a specialized duty of great significance to the Italian government during that period (1900-1914). Proof of my hypothesis can be found in two noteworthy characteristics that I noticed within the files. First, there were several telegrams sent to Italy’s Department of Public Security (Ministero dell'Interno: Dipartimento di Pubblica

Sicurezza), regarding information on Italy’s Russian population, from police bureaus in

Florence, Naples, Venice, Milan, Turin and Rome. Second, within many of the police reports,

Russians whom they were tracking were placed into distinctive groupings. These classifications included “Russian persons of interest” (sudduti russi), “Russian refugees” (profughi russi),

“Russian nihilists” (nihilisti russi) and “Russian terrorists” (terroristi russi).185

185 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat, A11, b. f. Nervi-

69 Unique “Italian” sociopolitical culture and its effect on the Foreign Agentura

When Rachkovsky took charge of the Foreign Agentura in 1885, the French capital was an ideal cultural fit for the implementation of his unique strategy of eliminating the influence of the Russian émigré intelligentsia on the continent. Rachkovsky developed the agency from the ground up based on two core operational and philosophical approaches. According to Russian law, any individual who left the Russian Empire without official permission and attained citizenship in another. For that act of defiance, if this “rule was violated he/she was banished and his his/her property was sequestered.” 186First, he would use the French media to orchestrate a successful propaganda campaign that painted (Russian) emigration in the darkest colors as possible, and as a threat to the stability of Europe.187 Second, Rachkovsky enlisted the help of special undercover agents to stir up confusion and discord amongst various revolutionary groups.188 Also, during Alexander III’s reign, Rachkovsky would also recruit revolutionaries as provocateurs who could then help to discredit revolutionary proclamations and publications.189 In the subsequent segments of this chapter, I will show how the Okhrana’s counter revolutionary tactics were not able to work in Italy because, the southern Mediterranean republic had a unique socio-political culture that nullified their effectiveness.

186 Obolensky-Ossinsky,521

187 Zuckerman, 128

188 ibid, 129

189 ibid

70 Alexander III

For the ruling class of Russia, many of whom were educated in West Europe, public image of the Russian state was of major importance. As a result, in the face of a spike in political violence, the imperial aristocracy often hesitated to act too harshly for fear of being ridiculed by the civilized world and ……appearing to behave in an ‘Asiatic’ manner.190 Alexander III was astutely cognizant of the difficulty of navigating this cultural stigma. To ensure the survival of the Romanov dynasty, he had no choice but to a use a heavy-handed approach toward freeing his country from the perils of revolutionary extremism. As a result, his regime made three changes in its foreign policy. First, it worked diligently to demonize these radicals by spreading propaganda in Western Europe which legitimized its adoption of harsh political suppression to counteract the scourge of anarchism. Second, it made strong efforts to improve its diplomatic links with European countries. This was especially the case in those countries that had a Russian immigrant community and were also dealing with the problem of revolutionary extremism, such as France and Switzerland. Third, it used international relations to legally extend the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) in order to conduct special investigations of Russians abroad. Alexander III understood the need to both capture and monitor Russian revolutionary exiles in Europe because of the threat they posed to Russia’s international image, their existence as symbols of resistance against his regime and potential financial support they could provide to revolutionary movements operating within the empire. As already discussed, these rationales led to the establishment of an international wing of the Russia’s secret police known as the Foreign

Agentura (Zagranisaia agentura).191 A conspicuous component of Rachkovsky’s strategy was

190 Pipes, 314

191 Zuckerman, 43

71 the use of anti-Semitic propaganda, which was done to specifically demonize the Jewish emigrants who left the empire and relocated in the urban centers of Europe such as Paris. In

Russia, Alexander III sanctioned by royal decree the infamous “May Laws” in 1882. These anti-

Semitic laws were a critical factor in roughly 225,000 Jewish families who fled Russia between

April 1881 and June 1882.192 One noteworthy example of Rachkovsky’s overt slander of the

Jewish population in France (and Europe) came from a propaganda literature which he released under the pseudonym Jehvan Preval in 1892 called Anarchy and Nihilism (Anarchie et

Nihilisme). In the text, the mischievous director of the Foreign Agentura argued, among other things, that following the French Revolution the Jews had become the masters of the continent,

“governing by discreet means both monarchies and republics”193 The book also claimed that an international syndicate of extremely rich and powerful European Jews plotted to overthrow the

Russian Empire and thereby remove the only obstacle to worldwide domination.194

Rachkovsky’s incendiary remarks were intended to mobilize French society, which by the 1890s was just as virulently anti-Semitic as Russian society. In France, since the early 1880s, an unending flood of anti-Semitic novels developing the image of the rapacious, immoral and intolerant Jew, rolled off the printing press.195 During the same period, like Rachkovsky’s text, some of the best-selling anti-Semitic French novels were immediately translated into German contributing to the intensification of anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany.196

192 ibid, 44

193 ibid

194 Zuckerman, 132

195 Weinberg, Henry N. "The Image of the Jew in Late Nineteenth Century French Literature." Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 3 (Summer 1983), 242.

196 ibid, 242

72 Alongside this strategy of influencing French public opinion, he would deploy his agents to perform acts of provocation that reinforced and contributed to the Foreign Agentura’s anti-

émigré propaganda and undermined Russian emigration from within.197 In France, “Russians perfected the art of the agent provocateur.”198 This French term describes an espionage technique that was often used by the Agentura to infiltrate a European-based underground terrorist organization that was run by one or more fugitive Russian extremists. Okhrana agents would join a radical group and purposefully steer its members towards committing acts of violence.

However, the agent would tip off the local authorities about the groups plan and whereabouts prior to the carrying out the crime. Agentura agents would often impersonate Russian revolutionaries in such a manner to stir up trouble as well as to incite civil unrest in order to

"scare the French to undertake punitive actions against Russian radicals and to cooperate with the Okhrana.”199 In 1890, Rachkovsky would famously us an Okhrana agent named Abram

Landezen to initiate a fake plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. The Foreign Agentura’s

Director instructed Landezen to form an underground terrorist cell that would be interested in creating and smuggling a bomb into Russia. The agent was given funds to set up a bomb factory in the outskirts of Paris. On 28 May, Rachkovsky tipped off the Paris police about the plot. The

Prefecture subsequently arrested nine individuals along with carrying out massive sweeps into the homes of both Polish and Russian emigres. 200 Landezen was not among the individuals who had been detained by the French authorities. However, the plan worked brilliantly in

197 Ibid

198 Ibid, 13

199 ibid

200 Zuckerman, 137

73 Rachkovsky’s favor. As a result of what historians call the Landezen Affair, he was able to simultaneously galvanize French public opinion against Russian revolutionaries and solidify the

Agentura’s police cooperation with the Paris Prefecture.

Nicholas II

By the late 19th century, France was still jaded from the failed assassination attempt on the life of Napoleon III, which killed 8 people and wounded 142 at the Paris Opera in 1858.

However, the assassination of the French President Sadi Carnot did not push the government of

Frederico Crispi to help the Okhrana apprehend Russian terrorists who lived in Italy. The tsarist propaganda, designed to demonize the Russian revolutionaries on the continent, put fear in the minds of the French elite who witnessed an alarming influx of Russian refugees entering their country from the late 1890s. In Italy, despite the small number of Russian expatriates, there was a special bond between Russian and Italian radical traditions. 201 This was exemplified by the celebration of the centenary of Garibaldi’s birth by Russian emigres of a every political stripe. 202

This was part of the allure that attracted revolutionary elements to the country. Among this

Russian diaspora, there were fugitive revolutionaries who were wanted by the Russian government. One example is the legendary Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a friend of Italian national heroes such as Garibaldi and Guiseppe Mazzini, who was influential in forming early

Italian socialist groups in Naples and he argued that the Italian social revolution must aim for the abolition of the state.203 His rhetoric enticed a devoted legion of anti-establishment minded

201 Zuckerman (F.S), 50

202 Ibid

203 Ravindranathan, T. R. Bakunin and the Italians, 1st ed., 1. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988.

74 Italian revolutionaries who remained zealously committed to his idea of the destruction of the

Italian state. Arguably, Bakunin played a crucial role in Italy becoming the home of one of

Europe’s most dangerous anarchist cultures between 1870s and 1914. By 1872, Naples had the largest anarchist federation in Italy and Bologna had 76 anarchist sections in 1876.204 In the latter decades of the 19th century, these groups engaged in a politically motivated series of disturbances and atrocities and bloody murders205 throughout the country, which were aimed at destabilizing the Italian government. The activities of Italian anarchists, occurred as a result of Russian political exiles who were fomenting revolutionary activity throughout the unified Italian peninsula. They were motivated toward extremist violence by prominent Italian such as Enrico

Malatesta, Salvatore Ingregos, Francesco Merlino and Luigi Galleani. Each of these men were acolytes of Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev. These activities were punctuated, when the

Italian King Umberto I was shot four times by Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci in 1900. During his trial, the Italian confessed that his actions were influenced by a Russian revolutionary in exile named Emma Goldman, whom he befriended during the time he emigrated to the United States six years prior.

Throughout the tenure of Tsar Nicholas II, Rachkovsky’s tactics of deliberate provocation of However, this the tactic of the agent provocateur could not work as well in Italy as it did in France because the demographics of the Russian population were different. The

Russophone/Russian diaspora in Italy grew from 1,387 persons in 1881 to 1,892 by 1911.206

204 Davis, John A. Conflict and Control, Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy, 1st ed., 197. Basingstoke: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

205 ibid, 224

206 Einaudi, Luca. Le politiche dell'immigrazione in Italia dall'Unità a oggi, 1st ed., 406. Roma: GLF Ed. Laterza, 2007.

75 Further analysis indicates that roughly sixty percent207 of them were living in Italy’s northern provinces. The majority of the group lived in the province’s industrial port and capital city of

Genoa. The rest stayed in resort towns along Liguria’s picturesque seaboard such as La Spezia,

Cavi di Lavagna, Ravello and San Remo. This coastline was given the moniker of the “Italian

Riviera” as a result of the similarity of its scenic Mediterranean oceanfront with the more famous

“French Riviera,” which runs contiguously from the French border to its west. Despite the small size of this Russian speaking diaspora in Italy, Liguria’s closeness to the French border as well as its mild Mediterranean winter climate attracted fugitive Russian extremists. San Remo became the base for the SR terrorist Battle Organization and a popular retreat for feared revolutionaries such as Boris Savinkov, Peter Karpovich, Vladimir Burtsev and Mark

Natanson.208 The Russian Ministry of Interior (MVD) grew increasingly impatient and frustrated with the Italian government’s continued refusal to either grant their petitions for extradition of fugitive Russian emigres or allow Okhrana’s Foreign Agentura to engage espionage activities on

Italian soil. In 1910, the agency recruited an Italian by the name of Eugene Intermezzi to conduct the surveillance of Russians in Cavi di Lavagna by undertaking the perlustration of émigré mail.209 Intermezzi gained the trust of local postal workers whom he placed on his official payroll. These individuals allowed him to view and make wax copies of correspondences between emigres. These copies were subsequently sent to the agency’s headquarters in Paris.

Intermezzi success saw the Okhrana send Russians with the knowledge of Italian to infiltrate

Russian communities in small resort towns across Liguria. However, since many of the

207 Ibid,406

208 Zuckerman ,50-51

209 Zuckerman, 50-51

76 individuals within these communities lived in isolation from the Italian population, in some cases, it became easy for them to detect Okhrana operatives. Strangely, in Italy, the revolutionaries thought this was their most secure and welcoming refuge.210 This feeling of safety moved Georgi Plekhanov to pen an open letter of gratitude to the Italian people in a newspaper called The People of Italy (Il Popolo d’Italia).211 Plekhanov, considered as the Father of Russian Marxism, lived for many years as an exile in Italy with his wife where he established a sanitarium in the Ligurian town of San Remo. In the correspondence, he said that “most banished Russians came to Italy seeking refuge…and they always found the widest hospitality and the noblest sympathy”. 212 Maxim Gorky relocated from Russia (via a short stay in the

United States) to the island of Capri, off the coast of Naples in 1906. He lived on the island until

1913, where he set up a school dedicated to teaching his brand of Marxist theory. On the Isle of

Capri, Gorky was joined by Russian intellectuals who had fled from Russia such as Alexander

Bogdanov, Vladimir Bazarov and Anatoly Lunacharsky. His school attracted both veteran revolutionaries who would teach there and “green youth” from Russia who wished to be taught by them. The future leader of the Bolsheviks first visited Gorky in Capri on April 23, 1908, staying until April 30. The primary reason for the visit was to explore whether a theoretical quarrel brewing between Lenin and the teachers at Gorky’s Capri party school could be averted.

1 Each of these men were wanted by the Paris Office and its Foreign Agentura.

One pertinent example of the manner in which the Italian authorities monitored the

Russian diaspora community , was found in a letter entitled, “Nervi-Colonia Russa (Nervi-

210 ibid

211 ibid

212 ibid

77 Russian Colony),213 which was received by this ministry from the Police Department of Genoa

(Prefecture di Genova) on March 14, 1911.214 The contents of this particular document stated that the Genovese authorities were aware of the existence of “approximately 800 (eight hundred)

Russian persons” who resided in Nervi. 215 This locale, was a district that was located on the outskirts Genoa, the capital city of the northern Italian province of Liguria. This telegrammed correspondence, which was addressed to the ministry’s director named Luigi Luzzati,216 also included a further demographic breakdown of this national group. It estimated that within this particular enclave of Russians, about “three hundred (300) lived in various hotels and five hundred (500) were tenants of various landlords.217 I was not able to find any overt examples of anti-Semitism in the Italian authority’s collection of intelligence on the Russian/Russophone community in Italy.

Conclusion

By using Italy as a case study, this chapter investigated how Russian statecraft and foreign policy, the Okhrana's police alliances, and intrinsic socio-political cultures influenced how the tsarist government used the Foreign Agentura on the continent. Since each of these three dynamics often determined either the success or failure of the agency's counter-revolutionary

213 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

214 ibid

215 ibid

216 "Ministero dell'Interno Dal 1861." Ministero Dell’Interno. Accessed July 12, 2018. http://www.interno.gov.it/it/viminale/ministri-dal-1861.

217 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Affari generali e riservati, 1911 cat. A11, b. f. Nervi-colonia russa

78 initiatives, this analysis helped to isolate three specific reasons for Russia's inability to put the

Okhrana in Italy. These rationales were based on using primary and secondary source materials to compare Italy, the least successful region for Agentura activity, with France, which was arguably the most successful region for Agentura activity. First, Russia was unable to open an office of the Foreign Agentura in Italy because it was unable to replicate the unique diplomatic relationship it had with France. Second, Russia was unable to place an outpost of the Foreign

Agentura in Italy because of its inability to replicate the successful Franco-Russian police alliance with Italian authorities. Third, Russia was unable to open an outpost of the Foreign

Agentura in Italy because the southern Mediterranean polity was socially and politically different than Russia and other countries where the Foreign Agentura took root. In the next chapter

(Conclusion), each of these three hypotheses will be further discussed as part of a didactic exercise to show that Italy’s omission form the Foreign Agentura expansion was a quotient of the limitations of Russia’s espionage capabilities on the European continent.

79

Chapter 4: Conclusion

Introduction

The primary purpose of this essay is to isolate the historical reasons for Russia's failure to establish an outpost of the Okhrana's Foreign Agentura in Italy between 1900 and 1914. During this timeframe, the tsarist government under Nicholas II (1894-1917) gradually added new divisions in order to increase the agency's spy activities throughout Europe. Strangely, while

Russia failed to expand into Italian territory, it successfully installed branches of the Agentura in nearby Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Berlin, Bucharest, and Constantinople. Although the Okhrana’s counter-revolutionary activities seemed to have flourished in these nearby locations, it appears to have lacked the requisite organizational prowess to infiltrate Italian sovereign territory.

In the second chapter, I provided historical information about the origins of the Okhrana in the early years of Tsar Alexander III’s reign as well as the sociopolitical factors that influenced its bureaucratic evolution of its Foreign Agentura during tumultuous rule of his successor, Nicholas II. The chapter explains that the Okhrana was a late 19th century evolutionary step of a behavioral tradition among Russian monarchs to instinctively create autonomous organizations of secret agents, which they personally directed to identify and eliminate political threats to their autocratic rule. The creation of the Okhrana after the assassination of Alexander II (1855-1881) as well as the social and political factors that led to the creation of the Foreign Agentura early in Alexander III’s tenure (1881-1894). This didactic organization of pertinent background information is designed to inform the reader about the key social and international geopolitical factors which had a significant influence on both the success

80 and failure the Russian government’s early 20th century counterterrorism initiatives. In addition, the data presented in chapter two, gives insight into the rationale behind the tsarist government’s deployment of the Okhrana on the European continent during the respective tenures of its six directors.218

The third chapter revolves around my use of Italy (1883-1914) as a case study to investigate how Russian statesmanship/statecraft, the Okhrana's police alliances, and intrinsic socio-political cultures influenced the Russia’s ability to employ the Foreign Agentura to fulfil its foreign policy objectives pertaining to hegemony in Europe. The case study chapter’s analysis provides a historical lens through which I isolate some of the specific reasons for Russia's inability to put the Okhrana in Italy. In this chapter, I compare and contrast the Foreign

Agentura’s activities in other states with its initiatives Italy to show how each of these three dynamics often determined either the success or failure of the agency's counter-revolutionary initiatives in Europe.

The Argument (Recapped)

Over the course of the post-1900 expansion of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agentura, there were three critical historical factors which combined to accentuate the atypical nature of Italy’s conspicuous omission from the Russian Ministry of the Interior’s (MVD) European-based intelligence network. First, during this timeframe, the Italian government under Prime Minister

Giovanni Giolitti (1901-1914) openly challenged Russian hegemony in the Balkans. Second, the

Giolitti regime also maintained Italy’s participation in the Triple Alliance (1882). This inter-

218 Peter Rachkovsky (March 1885 to November 1902), Leonid Rataev (November 1902 to August 1905), Arkady Harting (August 1905 to January 1909), Captain Andreev and Captain Dolgov (February to November 1909 and Aleksandr Krassilnikov (November 1909 to March 1917).

81 governmental pact mandated the country’s military allegiance to both Germany and the Austro-

Hungarian polity against the Russian empire. Roughly two decades later, the treaty between these three states, was the geopolitical catalyst for Italy’s overtly hostile diplomatic rapport with

Russia. Third, from the turn of the 20th century, the southern Mediterranean republic gradually became a new hub for anti-tsarist revolutionary activity. The Italian peninsula’s warmer winter climate, its many picturesque resort towns along its coastlines, and the allure of its cultural landmarks made Italy a popular retreat for feared revolutionaries such as Boris Savinkov, Peter

Karpovich, Vladimir Burtsev and Mark Natanson.219 These revolutionary-minded members of this exiled Russian social caste, challenged the legitimacy of Nicholas' rule through the orchestration of anarchist attacks on high-profile members of the Russian police and the dissemination anti-tsarist propaganda literature from abroad. This conspicuous failure of Russia's spy network to gain a permanent base in Italy, suggests that Italy’s exclusion from the Foreign

Agentura’s enlargement process was a quotient of the organizational and operational limitations of Russian foreign policy.

My hypothesis contradicts the general depictions of the Foreign Agentura made by the limited number of Russian scholars who have produced academic literature on the Okhrana.

Among this group includes several influential Western social scientists such as historian Richard

Pipes, Richard Deacon, Fredrick Zuckerman, Ben Fisher, Barbara Jelavich, Dominic Lieven and

Gregory Hingley. I argue that the lack of analytical diversity in the historiography has strongly influenced a tendency among these academics to over-exaggerate the Okhrana's effect on 20th- century international espionage, the cleverness of its agents, the ingenuity of the tactical counter-

219 Zuckerman (F.S), 51

82 revolutionary acumen of its directors and its pivotal role in the prevention of the Romanov dynasty’s demise until 1917.

In this thesis, I identify three factors that led to Russia’s inability to establish an Okhrana presence in Italy. First, Russia was unable to open an office of the Foreign Agentura in Italy because it was unable to replicate the unique diplomatic relationship it had with France. In the early 1880s, the Russian government was able to take advantage of French government’s intense fear of Germany’s military aggression. France’s geopolitical isolation forced its government to change its traditional antagonistic attitude toward Russia in order to have it as a military ally

France could call on in case it needed to fight a war against Germany. The Franco-Prussian geopolitical alliance provided Russia with an excellent opportunity to extend the operations of the Okhrana in Paris, which by the 1880s had become the largest urban center for Russian revolutionary activity. The strengthening of the relations between the two states until World

War I, crucially allowed the Paris Office to remain as the center of Russia’s espionage network in Europe.

Unlike in France, Russian statecraft was unable to manipulate Italy in a similar manner to create a favorable relationship with Italy. In 1882, Italy had joined Germany and the Habsburg

Empire in forming a Triple Alliance 220 in which Italy was expected to provide military backing should France and Russia fight Germany and Austria-Hungary.221 Per the terms of this agreement, Italy did not have any potential enemies against which Russia could leverage its standing as a military power to offer protection. Also, unlike in the French case, Russian statecraft was stymied by the hostile anti-tsarist nature of Italian foreign policy since it joined the

220 Jelavich, 197

221 ibid

83 Triple Alliance in the early 1880s. From the early 1880s through to World War I, the Balkans region became increasingly important to Italian imperialist ambitions, especially as the Italian government found it difficult to manage and control its territorial acquisitions in North African and East Africa.

Since countries such as Serbia and Macedonia were closer and already under the control of Italian ally Austria, successive Italian governments, from Crispi to Giolitti found it more geopolitically viable to challenge Russian hegemony in the Balkan region. Secretly, between

1902 and 1914, Italy actually had plans to seize the province whenever there was a Balkans crisis.222 These imperial desires for land across the Adriatic Sea were one of the factors why the

Italian state went to war with the Ottoman Empire in 1911,223 and worked against Russian interests during the First and Second Balkans Wars.224 During this period, Italian foreign policy strategies hindered any full cooperation from the Italian government in helping the Foreign

Agentura’s counter-revolutionary activities on the peninsula.

Second, Russia was unable to place an outpost of the Foreign Agentura in Italy because of its inability to replicate the successful Franco-Russian police alliance with Italian authorities.

Until the reconfiguration of the Russian police in the early 1880s, French governments monitored the actions and thoughts of their population more closely and consistently than any other European system.225 When the Foreign Agentura was created in the early 1880s, from its inception, the Okhrana’s relationship with the French Surete was symbiotic.226 The French

222 ibid

223 The Italian-Turkish War occurred from September 29th 1911 and October 18th 1912.

224 First Balkans War (October 8th 1912- May 30th 1913), Second Balkans War (June 29th-August 10th, 1913)

225 Zuckerman, 8

226 Fi

84 authorities did not view the Russian agency as either a threat to their jurisdiction or operational purpose. Secondary sources such as Frederick Zuckerman point to the fact that from the early

1880s to 1900, Italian police were not as technologically savvy to work with the Okhrana.

Primary source documents, such as the government documents pertaining to the search for

Osman-Bey show that Italians were still doing handwritten documents until the early 20th century. The lack of the creation of an inter-police alliance with the Italian police in the 1880s made it difficult to do so in the early 20th century, when challenging Russian hegemony in the

Balkans became a central component of the Italian government’s foreign policy agenda.

Following the assassination of their own monarch Umberto II in 1900, the Italian government under Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (1901-1914) employed a world-wide network of secret agents who kept him informed about anarchist intentions.227 For much of the pre-World War I years, Italy primarily relied on its own police to deal with any potential issue which could be caused by the Russian intelligentsia in across the country. Italy did not need to cooperate with the Russian secret police agency.

Despite the small population of Russian emigres in the country, the Italian government closely monitored the various Russian communities. Italian secret agents of the country’s

Ministry of the Interior documented the dates of their arrival, their places of residence, with whom they fraternized and provided details of their physical descriptions in their reports. For many Russians in Italy, the small towns along the picturesque Mediterranean coastline of the northern Italian province of Liguria such as La Spezia, Cavi di Lavagna and San Remo were popular destinations. In the latter, the apparent ambivalence of the Italian government toward

Russian immigrants allowed the town’s beach resorts to become a retreat for prominent members

227 Zuckerman, 19

85 of the Social Revolutionaries (SR) terrorist Battle Organization. Secondary sources provide evidence that the Russian Ministry of Interior (MVD) grew increasingly impatient and frustrated with the Italian government’s continued refusal to either grant their petitions for extradition of fugitive Russian emigres or allow Okhrana’s Foreign Agentura to engage in espionage activities on Italian soil. Primary sources provide little evidence of any inter-police cooperation between

Russia and Italy. They actually provide evidence of a few attempts by the Russian authorities through the Paris Office to foster a friendship indirectly via the Italian embassy in Paris. Primary sources show that, at the turn of the 20th century, the Italian authorities were capable of monitoring the Russian community by themselves. Secondary sources indicate Russia failed at going it on their own as they perhaps were forced to rely on limited amounts of Italian police information. Secondary sources show that Russia was very unsuccessful at catching terrorists and these failures exposed the organizational limitation of the Foreign Agentura and prowess of their agents.

Third, Russia was unable to open an outpost of the Foreign Agentura in Italy because the southern Mediterranean polity was socially and politically different than Russia and other countries where the Foreign Agentura had operations. When the Okhrana began its operations in

Russia in the early 1880s, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, which was endemic in Russian society at the time, jaundiced the police practices. In the empire, Russian nationalism was a strong element of Tsarist political power since the days of Nicholas I (1825-1855) and the Russian

Orthodox Church was at the center of that. Therefore, Alexander III’s repression of Russian society largely targeted Jews as well as other minorities such as Ukrainians and Poles, who fled the empire in the thousands to avoid persecution. The same dynamics continued under Nicholas

II as he struggled to prevent Russian revolutionary challenge to his absolutist rule. When

86 Rachkovsky took control of the Foreign Agentura, he used two tactics in his assault on Russian

émigré political activity. First, he used the French media to orchestrate a successful propaganda campaign that painted Russian emigration in the darkest colors as possible, and as a threat to the stability of Europe.228 Alongside this strategy of manipulating French public opinion,

Rachkovsky deployed his agents to perform acts of provocation that reinforced and contributed to the Foreign Agentura’s anti-émigré propaganda and undermined Russian emigration from within.229 At the time, France was the largest Catholic country in Europe and Rachkovsky was able to be successful because anti-Semitism and Xenophobia was also rampant in French society during the approximately four decades of the Foreign Agentura’s existence. Germany and

Austria, which were once part of the Holy Roman empire were two Christian polities in which the Jewish minority was much maligned. Therefore, even under Rataev and Harting, the Foreign

Agentura could rely on demonizing Russian emigration and Jewish membership among the

Russian intelligentsia cohort in order to maintain the clandestine support of French politicians for its counter revolutionary activity. French society was easier to manipulate after assassinations,

(such as the murder of French President Sadi Carnot in1894) to rally support. Especially as the

Russian community in France grew from around 5000 persons at the start of the 1980s to approximately 35000 by 1911. As a result, production of anti-revolutionary propaganda as well as the use of the agent provocateur flourished in France, Germany, Austria.

However, over the course of the Foreign Agentura’s existence, Italian society had different cultural attitudes and tropes which nullified the Okhrana’s reliance on anti- revolutionary propaganda and counter revolutionary practices such as the use of the agent

228 Zuckerman, 128

229 ibid

87 provocateur. Although Italy was a Catholic society, anti-Semitism was not as strong as it was in

France and Germany. The majority of Russophone Jews lived in Genoa, Liguria. In 1860,

Liguria was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. The history of the post-united Liguria, Genoa, became the natural port of Piedmont. Nonetheless, the city benefited from the great economic reforms during the early years of Italy’s existence as a sovereign polity. In this period, Genoa received an extraordinary impulse towards the renewal of its ancient naval and shipbuilding tradition and acquired a leading function in driving the development. Since 1848 the Russian emigre community in Italy steadily increased. In 1901 it numbered about 1,000 souls. In Italy, especially after 1900, when Italian monarch Umberto II was killed the Italian government was equally as repressive as the Tsarist government in Russia. However, since the Russian community was small and lived primarily in Liguria’s Mediterranean beach resort towns along the Italian Riviera such as Cavi Di Lavagna, Porto Maurizio and San Remo, it was easy for the

Italian police to monitor them without assistance from Russia’s Okhrana. Since people such as

Maxim Gorky came to Italy and did not participate in anarchist activities, there was neither a cultural fear of Russian immigration or Russian anarchism for the Russian government to exploit as they did in France. As a result, although the Foreign Agentura sent agents into Italy, it did not have the social and political support in Italy and could not be successful in catching wanted fugitives of the Russian émigré intelligentsia who lived in Italian territory.

Conclusion

The goal of this project was to seek answers to Russia's failure to open a bureau of the

Okhrana in Italy between 1900 and the start of World War I. This essay achieved this objective

88 through its specific investigation into the reasons why the Russian government was unsuccessful, despite the numerous geopolitical conundrums Italy provided, which hindered Russian foreign policy objectives concerning Europe. By answering this research question, I argue that Russia was not immune to experiencing major organizational setbacks that limited the Foreign

Agentura’s prowess in achieving its foreign-policy objectives in Europe. Based on my survey of primary and secondary sources, I was able to use this analysis to isolate three specific reasons for

Russia's inability to put the Okhrana in Italy. These rationales were based on using primary and secondary source materials to compare Italy, the least successful region for Agentura activity, with France, which was arguably the most successful region for Agentura activity. Ultimately, I hope that this thesis could help shift the historiographical assessment of the Okhrana’s international wing toward a new trajectory by using my discoveries to counterbalance the propensity of scholars to inaccurately over embellish the Foreign Agentura's prowess as an espionage agency.

89 Appendix

Appendix 1

90 Appendix 2

91 Appendix 3 Appendix 4

92 Appendix 5

93

Appendix 6

94

Appendix 7 Appendix 8

95 Appendix 9 Appendix 10

96 Appendix 11

97 Maps/Illustrations

Map. 1 (Map of the Kingdom of Italy between 1900-1914)

98 Map. 2 Province of Liguria with its main cities and towns

99 Map. 3 Liguria and its proximity to the French Border

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